


Midnight on the Demon Patrol

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Angst and Humor, Demon Summoning for Fun and Profit, Demonic Possession, Dubious Consent, M/M, Power Dynamics, Xeno, demon!Karkat - Freeform, magical slavery, when i say xeno i mean it, yes still updating i will tell y'all when it stops i promise stop asking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-23 19:54:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 233,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/625941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fighting fire with fire is okay in theory but Detective-Summoner Dave L. Strider figures trying to summon corporeal demons to the mortal plane to fight other demons is likely to backfire spectacularly. Sadly for him his inner Knight gets the vapors at the thought of letting anyone else play guinea pig. </p><p>Yup, he is totally hogging the demon. What could go wrong? (Oh no, Dave, why did you have to think that.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What Asuka wanted: a quick silly smut-tastic xenolicious demon summoner/demon davekat AU pr0n thing.
> 
> What Asuka got: every character ever telling her who they were and what they were doing in this AU EVEN ALPHA DAVE AND ROSE SERIOUSLY???, three tons of setup, shiny shiny “what this demon character wants/needs sacrificed to offer their services” oh dear lord meulin’s is EVIL, Dave and Latula bonding, Kankri???, a war between hell dimensions and the ~mortal plane~, and only the quickest bit of tease followed by OH WELP I JUST REMEMBERED THIS WOULD BE V.V. DUBCON AND I AM NOT A DOUCHE LET ME SET THIS UP TO ANGST LONG AND HARD AT LATER DATE.
> 
> Note, there's still porn, eventually. But. Yeah.

No one's sure which other Aspect Blood has the most affinities with, so they do the summoning as generic as it comes. Between day and night, the sky a smear of photoshopped bright mauves and lurid pollution-pinks and on-fire oranges. (There might really be a fire over the West part of the city. Wouldn't surprise Dave too much. It's Roxy and Jake's lookout tonight in any case.) Between Earth and Sky, which means on the police station's helipad. (That big "land here" circle sure is convenient.) A full moon rising, because it facilitates almost everything.

Detective-Summoner Dave L. Strider surveys the elegant, glistening loops and pointed scrawls of the pentacle sprawling before him and feels strangely proprietary. He can be, took him five months to donate the three pints of blood that went into it.

"Now let's all have a good long laugh as we discover using blood to summon blood was like the one thing guaranteed not to work," he muses, hands in his pockets, as he waits for his twin-slash-colleague to do her thing.

Sitting on her heels, wrist dripping slowly down onto the activating point of the pattern, Detective-Summoner Rose Lalonde looks up. Her eyes sheen oddly red, though the detached, disdainful look that too many people would confuse with one of her own usual expressions speaks louder.

"Your flippant unconcern with the possible catastrophic results for all involved in this experiment is noted."

Dave teases at the hollow between two teeth with his tongue, spits over his shoulder, casually. The demon wearing his twin pretends he's shuddering in disgust and not in wariness. "Hey, Kankri. Here to tell your butt buddy 'I told you so'? Nice little first row seat, huh?"

The look he gets for the quip is all Rose, though. Kankri _wishes_ he could look that effortlessly malevolent. "Dave, please desist from antagonizing my rider. He's been uncooperative enough as it is." On his right, opposite Rose exactly, Jade glowers at him, a cloud of ghost hair swaying and whipping around her frame like seaweed caught in a riptide.

Dave desists, hands raised in surrender. If Kankri hadn't been caught in Rose's nosy desire to learn everything about everything ever they likely wouldn't even know Blood affinity was a thing; there sure has been no human so far turning up with it, or if they have their potential is too low to do anything with. He's been real cagey about actual useful information, though, and they're low on test subjects to extrapolate from.

Also Dave is bored as fuck, because he's got nothing to do but stand there on the precisely marked spot and wait to see if this little experiment is going to kill him (who cares) and his two best girls ( _he_ cares.)

_Hehe, what about me, boy?_

"You're my fave grrrrrrl, of fuckin' course," he says under his breath, rolling the R like a low growl, and feels a ghostly dragon tail curl protectively around his legs before she wisps away.

"Everyone ready to roll?" Jade asks. John and Dirk and Jane are here to watch, possibly save them all from certain death if/when this little experiment backfires. They chorus a "yeah, yeah". Only John's has any real enthusiasm.

Dave shrugs, and thinks about how many candles and old wristwatches he'll give Aradia and her springtime warmth if she keeps Damara's soul-slicing blizzard presence away from him. He's going to have enough to deal with in...

_Now._

The sun is a burning sliver, crawling over the horizon, three, two, one, gone. His heart beats in his temples, in his throat, one-two, three-four. Hair rises along his forearms.

He wraps himself in Latula's dragon-scale armor, sage and silver wisps, watches arterial red stain Rose's arms and face in wet blotches. Jade is standing back out of the first circle, so she won't taint the call, though her skin glimmers with little half-moon rainbow scales and a high school's worth of tentacles weave lazy nets behind her.

For the longest instant nothing comes, and he thinks, it was a mistake, there's no demon out there with this pattern and expression of power, not even standing next door to the hell gate.

And then there's rage, incandescent; he chokes on it, finds his hands fisting on their own, shaking with the need to -- he's not sure, run up to Rose, punch her in the face for another of her harebrained asshole schemes, _if you don't do it then I shall, dear brother_ , tear off his own hair in frustration, kick a hole through the _fucking roof_ \--

_Whoa grumpnut, back your tush off, this is my ride._

Thank _fuck_ for Latula.

He breathes.

Lifts a wrist to his mouth, gnaws at the bandage until the knot comes undone, gnaws some more at the crusty cuts there (he's going to give himself an infection, awesome.) In the middle of the circle there is nothing yet so material that it's visible. He can feel it anyway, like a coming storm front through every bone he ever broke in his life, the two teeth he's got fillings in. Rage and frustration keep clawing at him, at Rose, though what's got him frowning the most is that nasty undertow of guilt and my-own-fault, I-let-them-down. He's used to it, but it's an even chance whether Rose will ignore it with a haughty snort or dive right the fuck in and embrace it like it's her long-lost daughter. Every inch of exposed skin on her is now dripping crimson, warm enough to smoke in the cooling evening air.

He spits some of his own blood and scabs into the circle.

He can feel its attention whiplash onto him, forgetting Rose entirely. Awesome. He shakes his wrist, spattering more warm drops before his feet.

"Come at me, bro."

It comes at him.

There's no words to be put on a fight where the battleground is his soul, but then again none are necessary. He knows what's up, he knows what's going on, it's only the exact same thing he went through the first time he called onto Damara. It's trying to burn him out, nest under his skin.

(Only Damara was never given a gap in the world so large to slip through, so much of her self to bring to bear.)

It tries to unmoor him from himself and Latula snaps shearing fangs and fastens him with chains of dragon steel, it chips away at his underpinnings and Aradia turns them unchipped anew.

It thinks they're going to force a contract on it, trap it in between Hell and Earth to offer its help in exchange for stolen glimpses out of Dave's senses, a handful of offerings. "You poor bastard, if you only knew," Dave mutters under his breath, as Jade steps boldly in the circle, wrapped in witchery and Life.

It takes Jade-Feferi exactly three minutes and forty-one seconds to weave and bind gray and red smoke and lashing suggestions of half-seen spines in whirling fog. It takes it exactly twelve minutes and six seconds to stop screaming its brand new throat hoarse.

By then the smog is gone in wisps in the evening breeze and there's nothing left in the circle but a creature of shelled limbs and stunted wings in a sad huddle on the roof, proportions off -- back legs too long to go comfortable on all fours but bending one time too many to walk upright like a human, a ridiculously short and chubby tail that won't balance it or be used as a whip, a hard segmented shell of dull lead gray giving way to smoky velvet right on the most vulnerable parts -- belly, inner thighs -- an awkward jumble of the idea of a demon and the reality of a human.

"You remember the next step, bro?" Dirk says from behind Dave. Dave nods. The ceremony is cobbled together out of wild-ass guesses and moldy mice-eaten tomes, but this part, yeah, he hasn't forgotten. It's the part where he might manage all on his lonesome to both get his fool ass killed and leave an unchecked, corporeal, fully-powered Class Four demon on the mortal plane.

He scratches the scabbed-over slices on his other arm open, and he sheds Latula and crosses into the innermost circle all on his lonesome.

The demon turns on him, mouth a mess of fangs. Its face is human enough, still that same sooty velvet, though the cheekbones are armored and two little dots gleam wetly on its forehead under a dark tangle of hair.

It's kind of pretty for a man, kind of handsome for a woman. Hard to say. The demon'll tell him later if it feels like either one, or none, or something else entirely. The chest is flat enough.

It flares its stubby wings, chokes on a throat-tearing growl. There's a line of blades along its spine, one per shell segment, all bristled up like a startled cat. It gathers its awkward legs under itself, tries to figure out how to use its new muscles. It's going to learn fast, all demons do, and then he'll be fucked.

Dave sits, legs crossed.

"Yo."

A rasping hiss. It gathers itself to pounce.

"Come to me, Knight of Blood," Dave says -- it's already in mid-leap, shit, it took less time than he thought to decide itself. He braces against armored collarbones as it tackles him onto concrete. It snaps hinged jaws that make its whole lower face look entirely inhuman; Dave grits out, " _drink of me and be bound_."

His blood is still dripping and making rivulets down his forearms, pooling in the crook of his elbows, it stings.

The demon freezes, nostrils flaring.

"Heh. Gotcha."

It snarls at him and snaps its bear trap jaw and accidentally knees him in the thigh with a spiked shell segment trying to make his arms give. Dave laughs, giddy. "C'mon, I'm offering so nicely too. Drink of me and be bound!" He feels like a dick, saying it like that, and not like "hey, trade your freedom for my sweet hemoglobin" but apparently there's power in being formal and shit.

There's even more power in tying a nice catch-22 to its pretty neck. Either it kills him and it's bound, or it lets itself be bound and... it's bound. Or it could kill itself, Dave supposes. He doubts it. Demons don't reach that level of power and self-awareness without a positively _feral_ drive to keep on existing.

"You diseased son of a _bitch_ ," the demon rasps, and, trembling, flicks the very tip of its snake tongue at the blood decorating his arm.

Bingo. Like the wild addict eyes weren't a hint.

"Knight of Blood," Dave repeats. The demon shudders over him, manages to tear itself from the blood long enough to sneer. Its eyes are glossy red.

Dave lets his hands fall off its collarbones. It's startled enough not to grab onto the chance to dive for his throat.

"Sit."

It sits. Thank _fuck_. It sits with eyes wide (oh hey wow there's a second, smaller set of eyes on its forehead under those bangs, weirdness), plops on its tush between Dave's knees, unthinking and stunned stupid and it's never going to be that surprised, that unresisting ever again.

A few drops aren't going to form a lasting contract. Dave offers his wrist.

"Drink," he orders, his skin brushing black lips. He knows how much the demon must crave it but it still tries to flinch back, still shudders, bites its own lip. It can't look away from his wrist. Dave thinks of all the tendons and nerves there are in there and how glad he is Jane will be able to heal him afterwards; fair bet he'd come out crippled otherwise, hasn't got enough pull yet to force so many little caveats alongside his orders...

It leans in, thick eyelashes fluttering dazedly.

It sets its searing-hot mouth on his skin and it sucks, without teeth, it tongues at the knife slit in his skin and it _purrs_.

Dave has left all his summons outside the innermost circle but somehow he still feels like Aradia is laughing in his ear. He stares, suddenly just this little bit breathless, as it flicks its snake tongue at the blood tracks over the back of his hand, and then back down the inside of his forearm. He finds himself lifting his arm obligingly when the demon can't crane its neck farther to get at the crook of his elbow.

It's got these small dull-tipped horns and that mass of oddly human-looking hair, just there under his nose as it feeds. He wants to see if it feels human, too.

" _Hsst_."

"Ow, what the fuck." Dave glowers at the demon's hair as the demon blinks at him, glowering somehow right through its blood-high haze. "You've got spines in here? Who thought that was a good fucking idea, seriously."

He goes to suck on his prickled fingers. The demon snatches them in its mouth before he can. They're almost nose to nose, breathing each other's air, Dave's fingers surrounded in wet heat. He stares at black lips.

Demons demand different sacrifices to call on and appease them, but the staple diet is blood, and sex. Unless they're Kankri, in which case it's a total absence of sex. Dave suddenly finds himself hoping guiltily it isn't a peculiarity of the Aspect, just a peculiarity of Kankri being Kankri.

No, fuck, it's one thing to rub one out alone in his bedroom while someone rides in the back of his head and giggles along. He's not going to order a corporeal demon to suck his dick.

"Dave?"

Especially not while his teammates are watching holy baby jegus. Urh. Yeah.

"Got it, got it." His heart is still racing a little bit, first from adrenaline and then from, yeah, moving along. He pulls his fingers out of the demon's mouth (dear lord that wet pop, that displeased _pout._ ) "With my blood I bind you," he mumbles; it's clear enough for his and the demon's ears, who else matters. "So long as I live on this plane, you will live. So long as I feed your magic and your life, you will obey me."

The demon is still staring at him sullenly, but it doesn't move away, kneeling with its hands on the floor between Dave's thighs, leaning into him almost despite itself.

"So what's your name?"

Silence. The small upper eyes blink, and then the normal ones. It's a bit creepy, but weirdly cute too.

"C'mon, tell me."

"Is that a fucking order," it rasps, and rustles its stubby wings. There's claws on the joints and claws at the tips, all _look, I'm a murder machine!_ and they're not even long as its arms.

"Dude, I don't want to order you to do every single thing, but if we start this kind of pissing contest I am damn well going to end it, okay?"

More stubborn silence. Only he can't leave the circle as long as he hasn't got the demon's name. Knight of Blood is a descriptor and it only works because there's only one of those in the circle. Might as well yell for a redhead guy in Ireland.

The demon hisses at him, and draws back, tears itself out of that little zone of shared body warmth. It paces on all fours, back and forth. The way its back legs move has this weird kind of insect staccato to it. Creepy thing. Dave could watch it for hours.

Which is good because he's probably going to end up watching it regardless.

Evening is falling fast, clouds on the horizon. His friends are waiting, some more patiently than others.

"Do you have it?" Jade mouths at him, bouncing in frustration.

"Yeah, 'course. No worries, babe."

"How does it feel?" wants to know Rose. Dave has no idea.

"Not... really... like anything? It's not inside my head."

"Well of course not, it has its own to inhabit. That wasn't..." A sigh. "Never mind. We'll study the results later."

It flicks a quick, assessing glance at her as it walks past, and her eyes sheen red and for a second Dave's twin sis and his pet demon sneer at each other in disturbingly identical ways. Rose shoves Kankri back down and the demon keeps pacing along the edge of the circle, eyeing Jade next, who stares back, unimpressed, and John who walks right up to the outside of the pattern to ogle it back and grin. "Kind of awesome, really! Man, if you kick even half as much ass in combat as we hoped for, I might ask one of mine if they wanna try it."

"Fuck you and your hideous face," Dave's demon replies very intelligently.

Dirk clears his throat pointedly. "Hey bro, the blood is going to flake off eventually. You're gonna be in deep shit if the circle breaks and you haven't got its name and the fundamental laws laid down first."

Dave sighs. "Okay, okay. Demon, heel. That _is_ an order."

The demon digs its claws two inches deep into concrete to keep itself from obeying. "Go fellate your own mating parts and choke to death on spunk. That's an order too."

Blargh. "Knight of Blood," Dave says, stern. He was tempted to laugh a bit, but if he doesn't make himself respected now the demon will just keep testing him forever and ever amen. Even when they like you, they test for fault lines and surprise weaknesses pretty much constantly, only if there's resentment behind it there'll be a lot more intent brought to bear, and it's not like they need to sleep; they can be _relentless_.

"Come to me," he says, and presses a few more droplets of blood out of his other arm.

It comes, growling all the while. It bows its head, humiliated, angry, and licks it off his forearm.

Dave can almost feel his power, his self, drip down its throat and diffuse through its body. It's weird, and so subtle he almost thinks he's making it up. "Give me your name," he asks again, quieter; he doesn't like how the demon won't meet his eyes anymore and it bothers him to make a spectacle out of breaking it.

The demon gives it.

Dave doesn't think he'll ever forget it, a soul of fire and acid and red-hot torn steel and desolate ruins, but when he tries to repeat it, the sounds merely come out "Karkat Vantas," sort of interesting but just meaningless noise in the end. Karkat shudders from head to toes nevertheless.

It's such a pale copy, what Aradia and Damara and Latula have given him to use to call on them, the same weird effect where you use their name and from you it's half sound and half knowledge and memory and for everyone else it's all plain banal sound, only with Karkat Dave thinks the sound of it is at best fifteen percent. If he's feeling generous. The sheer scope and detail of Dave's awareness of its self dwarfs it. He knew the contract to keep a corporeal demon would have to be stronger, but wow.

Dave looks at the demon, but it's staring at the ground between its armored hands, smoke-gray chitin gauntlets ending in vicious claws. He doesn't think telling it he has no idea how to decipher that map of its soul would help much.

Dave reaches out to poke Karkat's shoulder. "C'mon, let's finish with the house rules here and then we'll check if you can eat meat and stuff now. We got barbecue sauce and everything, you'll like it."

His friendly gesture gets hisses and fangs snapped at his hand, but it's nothing he wasn't expecting.


	2. Chapter 2

Inside the precinct there's a lot of sudden silence and staring when Dave comes down the stairs with Karkat in tow. The demon likes moving better on all fours, back legs folding and twitch-unfolding like a cicada's, and its claws clink loud on floor tiles.

"It's bound, seriously, guys, relax," he throws out there, and makes his way between partitioned desks, hands in his pockets. Karkat lets out a vibrating, crickety crackle-growl that manages both to be quiet and to carry to the ends of the room in a particularly hair-raising way.

"Maybe you could tell it not to freak out the officers," Jane whispers in his ear.

She's kidding, right? It's hilarious. "Nah, they need to steel their nerves." Out there there's loose Class Ones and Twos, bunches of criminals and lowlifes using the distraction of a localized demon apocalypse in progress to do their criminal thing, and criminals just plain going "hey why not" and using demons as anti-personnel weapons. There's a Don who reportedly has a Class Three at his beck and call, and it only charges a weekly street kid dinner to stay on retainer. "They'll thank us tomorrow."

Jane sighs. "I guess. At least Karkat is a vertebrate and doesn't make you feel like your eyes are about to pop like balloons trying to figure out its geometry."

Dave nods his commiseration. "Fucking six-dimensional demons, huh."

"Fucking human black hole brains," Karkat growls from down there. Dave snorts and holds the door to Captain Egbert's office open for it. It makes sure to walk close enough to rake its shoulder and wing spines nice and deep along the wood. Little brat.

Dave's sill not sure how he feels about his pet demon. He's a bit too drained to think that hard. Still, he's somewhat tense introducing it to his boss. Or his boss to it. Either direction has suckage potential.

Captain Egbert looks it over, looking calmly curious and not one whisper of nervousness about him. Things turn into a staring contest in a hot second.

"Cupcake?" Egbert asks casually, and holds out a pastry fished from his desk. Karkat snatches it before Dave can remind him to be careful, but no new graze blooms bright red on his Captain's dark fingers.

Okay, then. Bribery by food is a go. Dave shrugs to himself and closes the door behind him before moving to the desk to make his report.

"Went pretty much as planned, sir. It's forbidden to kill humans unless my life's forfeit if it doesn't, and to injure anyone at all unless permitted to. Have to admit in between listing all the nopes on arson and shit I forgot to include petty damages on the furniture." To be honest Rose likely included it in her long-ass lawyery list but he was getting tired of all those sub-clauses by the end.

"Hmm. Combat abilities?"

"Dunno. We'll have to test that tomorrow, sir. I'm kind of wiped." Jane healed his wrists, but he still has the blood loss to contend with, and the spectacular bruises on his thigh and his tailbone from being tackled and kneeled on. Plus the drain of power, but that's always hard to quantify. He wishes he came with a little HP gauge.

Egbert pats his shoulder in commiseration. "Not too wiped for paperwork, I hope."

"On second thought, can Karkat just eat me -- _I was kidding holy fuck_."

The demon is on the desk. Why is the demon on the desk, swear to fuck it borderline teleported. Why is it in his face and staring, all four eyes boring holes in his head, nostrils flared, claws digging in ... the Captain's paperwork aw damn it.

Dave gathers all the stern he can (not a lot). "Okay, get off the desk, desks are not for standing on. Sorry for the stomach tease but --"

"You are not allowed to fucking die, you useless piece of trash," it snarls low as it leans right into his face, until black bangs brush his shades. "You are going to live and fucking _live_ until you beg me to let you die, and I will _laugh in your face_ _and keep on dragging you out_."

Uh.

"That's nice to hear!" Egbert says casually, and shoos the spiny demon off his desk with a folder, like it's an obese and slightly grumpy Persian. Karkat lands back on the floor with a thud and hisses, disgruntled. It glowers at the man over the edge of the desk with enough malevolence that Dave starts to wonder if he'll have to order it not to, and then the demon huffs and glances back at the gift of cupcake it abandoned on the floor. Apparently Egbert is allowed to live, because Karkat goes right back to picking it up between two clawtips and licking cautiously at the frosting. It glares at Dave when it catches him looking and turns its back on him.

Egbert smiles and nods toward the reflective glass of his trophy case. Karkat has managed to smear frosting on its cheek and is licking fussily at its sugar-stained hand as the cupcake balances precariously on its other palm. Goddamn, how can a demon be cute.

[ ](http://saeto15.tumblr.com/post/39394703790/anything-can-be-appeased-with-cupcakes)

"Maybe 'cause you're made from me," he muses. Yep, totally that.

"Don't remind me, I want to tear those disgusting chunks of flesh off my chitinous frame enough already."

Yeah, okay, no, he almost feels like he should apologize to the protagonists of every single book Rose's ever read because having a demon is so far mostly hilarious, in that absurd sleep-deprived way.

"Alright, gentlemen. Strider, Lalonde's already making a report on the summoning itself, so you're excused from that, just make sure to sign off on it later. I'll need paperwork for your new partner."

Dave scratches his chin. "Uh, how? We've barely got the paperwork to declare which demons we managed to synch with, and we've been doing it for years. I don't think there'll be a form for incarnate summoning."

"Repurpose a K9 form," Egbert suggests with a little smile. Dave glances over quickly to make sure Karkat is still engrossed in its cupcake and not listening. "It'll do for now. When you're done you can go home."

"You're my favorite boss, boss."

\--

Takes him an hour until he's ready to leave, and half of that is because of Karkat. The bravest of his coworkers drop by his cubicle for random-ass stuff they absolutely need to ask right now (joke's on them, the second it hears people coming Karkat wedges itself under the desk and no inch of its scaly hide is visible from the door) and the demon has taken to tripping him every time he has to get up for a file or a new pen.

"I thought you were forbidden from injuring me," Dave muses as he sits at his desk -- hopefully for the last time.

The demon shrugs and grooms its massive front claws. "The way you hop? Won't injure you that way." Its eyes gleam as it glances up at him. "Except if you're too stupid to pay attention, in which case it's not deliberate, therefore an accident and not my fault."

Okay, so the demon is allowed to _hope_ it will succeed in hurting him, so long as it doesn't _think_ it likely that it will. Good to know. "Keeping me sharp, huh?" Little brat.

Dave doesn't even really mind; it's about the only real bout of rebellion the poor guy-or-gal can get at. (Dave's starting to think guy, but who knows. Kankri wanted to make up a specific pronoun for demonic beings who were sort of gendered but not in a human way and so shouldn't be equated with human ideas of gender. Dave takes it to mean that basically Kankri's a dude, he just happens to not pack any junk. Not any a human would understand, anyway. How do demons even breed? No one fucking knows.)

The demon flicks all its spines like a wave down its back and burrows back under the desk drawers, raking the underside with every single sharp edge it's got.

Predictably the cheap plywood bottom ruptures and showers it in old folders and empty staplers. Dave doesn't even bother telling it it's not allowed to make a nest with it.

"Moved your car to the underground garage, bro," Dirk tells him as he's checking the paperwork a very last time. "You got a blanket or shit for camouflage?"

"Hm? Oh, hey, thanks. No blanket, but there's that survival foil thing in my trunk. I'll have to order it to stay put, but it should be doable..."

Something smooth and prickly wraps around his ankle. Dave peers under the desk. Karkat's arm is wound around his leg like it's about to break his foot off at the ankle and it's glaring up at him, eyes glowing faintly in the dark.

"What the hell are you planning, you dribbling feces-hole."

"How to get to my place, dude," he replies, and gives his ankle a half-hearted shake. He's weirdly okay with his new demon shackle.

Briefly Karkat looks alarmed. "This isn't? -- But your soul left tracks all over."

"Wow am I happy to learn that my cubicle is well-marked. No, I meant my apartment. You, uh, know what an apartment is?"

"Of course," the demon says, overly disdainful.

"I'm not even gonna ask you how."

"At this point you might as well ask it how it can speak," Dirk says. He's watching Dave, his shoulder propped against the doorjamb, arms loosely crossed. "It knows because you know. Like all summoned demons ever in the history of ever."

"Yeah, but then why doesn't it know I have one?"

"Huh." Dirk hums thoughtfully. "You're right. Interesting. It probably knows what a car is, too, but if the pattern holds I bet it won't recognize yours. That's not a limitation riders have..."

Dave shrugs. That sort of academic stuff leaves him colder than a penguin in liquid nitrogen. So long as Karkat can identify an unbound demon and rend it to pieces he really doesn't care about the rest. He tugs his ankle free -- claws prickle his skin, almost to the point of blood -- and gets up. "C'mon, Karkat. Come with me. No tripping."

He wraps a wisp of _intent_ through the words, brings up the memory of Karkat's soul-pattern, the vaguest ghostly edges to give the words power. The demon follows at his heel as he turns his paperwork in, stiff-backed and hissing quietly under its breath.

It's kind of boring not to be shoulder-checked on his way down the stairs even once, but at this point Dave just wants his shower and his bed and maybe a pizza. In bed. While listening to indie music. Sounds like the perfect kind of evening.

He could even tweet from his mattress. #fuckyeahpetdemon. Today I summoned one of the Hordes of Hell. Verdict: even demons think pepperoni devil thing. Almost all his followers think he's a massive troll, shit would be hilarious.

He pops the trunk of his car open and turns to look at Karkat and it's huddled on the pavement, spines drooping and wings draped down over its sides like it's trying to hug itself.

"... Dude, you okay?"

The burning look he gets for that stunning moment of empathy would burn his face right off if Karkat wasn't forbidden from using magic at the time. (And if he can do flame stuff in the first place, eh, who knows.) Dave winces, crouches before it.

"I... Should I even ask what's wrong?"

"Do you have seven hours to waste in this dank sewer-hole," Karkat replies.

"I'm going to go with the most pressing thing being the garage lot." Sigh. He gets the foil blanket thinger out of the back and goes around to the passenger door. It's going to be extremely weird driving around with a big gold-wrapped lump on the passenger seat but suddenly he's worrying a bit about what Karkat will get up to alone in the trunk or the backseat. "Okay, let's get out of here. Sit."

He pats the passenger's seat. Karkat hauls itself up. Dave resigns himself to his piece of shit car losing all stuffing.

He has to smooth his hand down the demon's back to flatten its spines so he can nudge it until its back is flush against the seat. The seatbelt has Karkat going rigid; it doesn't even snarl, though, just closes its eyes and breathes in deep, nostrils flaring. Its wings are quivering at the tips.

Okay, physical restraints bad. Dave gives black hair a cautious pat. "It's just so you won't go bouncing around the cab in case someone rear-ends us, buddy, you just gotta push down on this button to be free."

"And am I _allowed_ to 'push down on this button'?" Karkat snarls back, small eyes closed, big eyes staring at him, malevolent.

"I'd rather you tried to handle it for a while. You're forbidden to distract me while I'm driving, but I figure you'd be okay with that, seeing how much it's gonna suck keeping me alive when I've wrapped the car and my soft human cranium around a pole."

Karkat stays silent for another ten seconds. "... What the everloving fuck ever."

Dave takes it as consent, and drapes the foil over his demon's head.

"I hate you," the demon says, very calmly. Dave gives a thoughtful hum and makes a little awning for its face so it can look out the window without being seen back. #fuckyeahpetdemon: gold-plated burqa, height of hell fashion. He is going to get _so many flames_ for this one. He's looking forward to it.

Dave gets in, starts the car. The seat cushion goes pop when Karkat's claws go through. Dave merges into traffic.

Karkat lasts three turns before it undoes its seatbelt and sinks into the leg space.

Poor guy. Dave drapes the foil better, and gives a blind pat at the head under it. Ow, spiny bit. He keeps driving, blood-beading finger in his mouth.

He's got an underground parking spot with his apartment, which right now is a damn blessing. Karkat growls grumpily at him and refuses to peek out of its hiding place.

Jane and Jade wrote letters to his neighbors and even consented to making calls for him about the new tenant to come, but they didn't manage to contact everyone and there's no telling who read or didn't read the things, or was okay with it in theory and won't be in practice. Then again his building is half empty, crazy how hard it is to rent things out in a city with an expanding hell gate. Means he got his place for cheap, and he can crank out the music hard, so hey.

Still, there's a chance he might be seen. He thinks about it for a second, and then, oh, fuck it, there's only the walk to the elevator and back. He picks up his demon bodily, kicks his piece of shit car door closed, and wobbles his way to the elevator holy fuck is Karkat heavier than he planned for. Oh hell, something in his back just twanged.

"Latula, grrl?"

Sitting on his arm like a little girl and still bundled up in foil, Karkat is looking at him like he's deranged.

_Welp. I can make it so you don't feel that mad hernia, but you're still gonna have it, dudzor._

He elbows the call button, leans hard against the wall. "I have a fucking hernia?"

 _Nah, just fooling._ The pain fades. _But you still gonna get mad ruination in those back muscles, fronting like that._

"Bluh bluh. Thanks, girl." He steps in the cab. Doors swish closed.

Karkat starts squirming to be let down. Dave doesn't really feel interested in figuring out how many ways it can fuck up the elevator, so he abstains from letting it off.

He's got a top floor apartment, reminds him of Bro's, though the roof over it isn't flat. He put in a mezzanine under the skylight, so his bedroom is up there and his TV and couch and computer stuff sprawl over the lone room, but even with separate kitchen and bathroom the apartment is still kind of small. He drops Karkat on the couch and limps back to the door to lock it.

By the time he turns around the foil is in shiny confetti all over the floor. "No damaging the couch," Dave orders before it can follow the same path as his car. He likes this couch, okay. It's pretty nice as a replacement bed when he doesn't want to bother climbing the ladder up to his bed and it fits under the mezzanine like it was made for it and it kind of cost him. "No damaging anything inside the apartment, Karkat."

Glare. Oh no, how can he live.

He still has to order some food. Blargh. "So, this is my place. You can explore. Don't go out a window, don't go out on the fire escape, don't go out on the roof. Don't set anything on fire. If it's locked up, leave it alone." He has the local pizza place on speed dial; only takes him two flicks of his thumb. "Uh. Leave the knives and swords and ninja swords alone. Hi, Sam, yeah, double the usual. Heh, yeah, I got space in my fridge, leftovers party all of next week. Okay, thanks, bye."

He hangs up. Karkat's gone.

"Karkat?" he calls, heart thudding. There's no space behind the couch and it can't magic itself invisible, this cupboard is too full of old vinyls to fit -- the ladder.

He climbs on the first rungs (ow, his fucking back), peers up. Ember-red eyes narrow at him from the shadowy corner where the roof slants too low to even sit.

... Well. Okay. He figures it probably wants to be alone for a while. And it just so happens he wants to vegetate until the pizza comes. He climbs back down (ow) and goes to sprawl elegantly over the couch. Foil crinkles under his ass.

Remote in hand, shoes toed off, he turns on MTV and closes his eyes, lets ridiculous pop clips paint the inside of his eyelids pretty colors.

Two minutes later the dulcet tones of some Emilie Autumn song or other wind through some random boy band. He feels around for his cell phone.

"Hey sis."

" _Hey, 'bro'._ "

His eyes stay closed and he stretches languorously as he mumbles, "Man it's been so long since we saw each other, wow, at least three hours or something. Mnh. World ending yet?"

" _My apologies, Kankri was most insistent_ ," she says dryly.

"Huh. Really? Weird." It's not like Kankri ever wants to keep track of Terezi, even though they're both Seers, or Vriska of Aranea even though they're both Light. It's actually pretty much an even chance that a demon will get hissy as fuck over a demon sharing its aspect -- case in point, Damara and Aradia.

" _He did not feel it necessary to inform me of his reasons, but as it happens, this reminds me; do think to keep track of Karkat's idiosyncrasies, so we can compare them to Kankri's. It still won't be enough to separate 'accidentally similar' from 'Blood attribute', but it'll be a start._ "

"I'll do that," Dave says, and keeps not doing anything.

" _Thank you_ ," Rose says, in a way which means she can tell.

"Anything else?"

" _How did the car trip go?_ "

"Hid in the leg space. Made holes in the upholstery. Got any idea why it'd hate a garage on sight?"

" _Hm. Kankri? No, he has no idea either. Oh, do you know if Karkat has a gender?_ "

"Nope. Karkat?" he yells up. "You a dude or a chick or something else or what?"

"I'm a none of your business, you prurient-minded swine."

" _No offense meant to Karkat, but I do believe he hasn't got all the facts at hand, such as that a wildly inappropriate misgendering such as 'he', while factually incorrect--_ "

Karkat's upper body bursts over the balustrade like a jack-in-the-box. It leans precariously far to glare at Dave's phone upside-down. "Fuck your whore mouth!"

" _\--is still much less problematic and, indeed, accidentally insulting as an 'it'. It is actually quite triggering to hear humans bandying that depersonalizing term about. And Karkat, that is factually incorrect, as I neither engage in sexual conduct nor, naturally, receive compensation for it, not that there is anything shameful in sex work--_ "

"... Yeah, thanks, Kank." Dave turns the sound back down. In his ear Rose is laughing, the witch. "So. He, she, they, it? Warning you if you ask for shim or something with three Xs and an accent I'm never gonna be able to use it without snickering. One of my hugest failings as an open-minded human being."

"Your first failing was being a human in the first place." It glowers, upside down still, short locks tumbling around its face. "What's wrong with 'it'?"

"It's usually for objects, not for people. Only most demons have about as much gender as a table or a paperclip, so."

A low growl. "I don't care. I'm a--" follows a sound/feeling the same as the first time Karkat told him his name, all wrapped up in concepts and soul-stuff, only the noise is impossible to transcribe -- "and that's good enough for me."

"Okay then, I dub you a dudebroman. Welcome to the sausage party. Complimentary straps-on in that bowl by the door."

" _You phallocentrist_ ," Rose laughs, " _you just went with male because you are._ "

"How can you accuse me of shallow physical gender-assigning behavior, when his crotch is as a Mattel doll." A pause, to let Kankri grumble and half-heartedly concede the point, and then he continues. "I went with dude cause he got no cleavage."

Rose is laughing too much to let Kankri out for all that sputtering he's likely doing in her head. Dave tells her goodnight, and drags himself off the couch to greet the delivery girl at the door.

Karkat doesn't come out to freak her out, or later when Dave is eating his own share with all three boxes open letting delicious pizza smells waft up, or when he calls and asks if he's thirsty.

He drags a cardboard box out from under the couch and fishes out an antique pocket watch, and spends the next three hundred and thirty-three seconds doing nothing but staring at the little hand as it races around the screen and thinking of Aradia and her soul-patterns of spring breeze and flowing time. Once he's done he shoos her out of his head and thinks of the end of all things and he brings his heel down on the watch. Damara examines the ruined and bent gears and deigns to admit it'll be sufficient, for now.

He has no idea what Latula will demand of him when his time's up, because ain't no demon on this Earth and below as will give without taking in trade, and she's never asked him for anything yet.

Eh. He'll pay his bill when it comes due; no use fretting before then. It's even odds whether he'll be alive two years from now.

He closes his eyes and listens to some more music. He'll shower in a minute.

\--

He dreams of tidal waves of acid blood and a winged man telling him to run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/post/39499692652/9w9-thank-you-for-answering-my-off-the-wall-body)   
> 


	3. Chapter 3

Sunlight in his eyes. Dave throws an arm in front of his face.

Huh, he's still alive. Good to know there was no loophole in the contract. At least none he's tripped yet. Hurrah.

He almost goes back to sleep, but he can tell he's on the couch and the sun doesn't get to there until pretty late in the morning. Fuck.

"Karkat?" he mumbles as he sits up. His back aches like all motherfucks. "Where are you, budd- _ow_."

He flops back on the couch.

The space between the couch and the coffee table his feet were propped on is littered in forks, tines up. The rest of his apartment... 

... Karkat can follow an order! Nothing looks damaged, at all.

His clean laundry is draped on the ceiling lamp, the TV, the doorknobs. His glass jars draw complicated and highly breakable labyrinths on the floor. His desktop and turntables have been neatly unplugged of every single wire and then wrapped in them; those look like no sailor's knots he recognizes. All the kitchen chairs are upside-down and tangled back to back, fancy ceramic plates precariously balanced on their feet so a wrong move will have them fall on the floor and possibly in pieces.

The thumbtacks he used to secure his posters to the walls are on the coffee table before him, drawing an acceptable rendition of a raised middle finger. The posters themselves are MIA.

Dave catches himself chuckling.

 _Someone was busy!_ says Aradia, chuckling along. _Are you going to punish him?_

"Nah," Dave replies. Karkat technically hasn't disobeyed, and it must have taken him a lot of sneaky work. Weird that Dave didn't even twitch at his presence; he must have gotten real close and one thing Dave retained from his childhood with Bro and Dirk was that deep sleep is for chumps who are asking for it.

He toes himself a space to stand amongst the forks and picks his way to the ladder. Oh hey, here are his Midnight Crew posters, scotched to the rungs so he can't climb up.

He considers tugging them off, too bad if the back rips a little. He considers that Karkat is likely hiding up there once again, tucked away in that shadowed corner.

He turns around and zigzags his way to the kitchen instead. There's a tower of drinking glasses and spoons on the table. He admires it as he starts his coffee.

... Okay, that's not coffee, that's salt. He finds the coffee in the sugar bag. Fair bet the saltshaker is kind of sweet right now. Mnh.

No chair, so he leans against the countertop and drinks, eyes closed.

When he opens them again Karkat is staring at him, half-hidden behind the doorway.

"You're kinda ninja," Dave says, and salutes him with his mug. "Want some coffee?"

Karkat's back spines rattle, his folded wings flick and tighten, his jaw muscles roll under fuzzy gray skin.

"You can say no, that's fine."

"Do you just not care because you're going to make me put it back, haha joke's on me?"

... Awgh, hell, he looks so tense and angry, miserable. Dave sighs and puts his mug down, quiets his voice. "Nah. You did nothing I'd forbidden. Be kinda cheating to change the rules on you midway."

And besides if there's one thing you don't do with demons it's break a contract. It can be unfair as all motherfucks and it can be unbalanced literally to hell and back, but once it's made it's made, the end. Demons hate nothing so much as an oathbreaker. Dave figures he wouldn't be breaking anything but an implicit one there, but best start things as he means them to go on.

"Am I supposed to find that generous?" the demon hisses. Something rattles in his throat underneath the words, like crickets or maybe like a rattlesnake. "Am I supposed to feel so overcome by your display of coolness and benevolence I fall horn-deep in abject adoration? Fellate your fingers, perhaps, hump your fucking boots?"

Dave makes a note to tell Rose he's already found two similarities to Kankri; the extended vocabulary and the frothing indignation at anything smacking of unfairness.

He shrugs, slides down the counter until he's in a crouch, balancing on the balls of his feet, ass pressed to the cupboard behind him. "You don't wanna be here and have no reason to hand me freebies, I get that. I'm gonna keep expecting you to do only what you're forced to do and nothing else, and if something happens I didn't cover it'll be on me for dropping the ball."

Karkat's claws flex slowly against the linoleum. He's started to lower his body, like he's this close to hunkering down and preparing to pounce.

"Is it because you're incarnate?" Dave asks. "None of the other demons care about fairness and generosity. If we give them less than they contracted for they kill us, but no hard feelings, and if we give them more they just think we're chumps." A thoughtful pause. "Then again, Kankri."

The demon pounces.

Dave so wasn't expecting it, and the position is so awkward, that he doesn't even move. Karkat's hands impact with the cupboard on both sides of his head, making the whole counter rattle.

"You know _nothing_ about _anything_ ," he hisses quietly, hot breath on Dave's face, and then he shoves off and storms out.

Dave has to scramble to get to the glass tower and stabilize it before it wobbles past recovery. "I didn't _make_ you drink my blood, asshole!" he yells after Karkat, annoyed.

He finishes his mug, and then he starts dismantling things. In the middle he has to take a break to warn his boss he'll only be coming in this afternoon for cause of demon.

He doesn't go upstairs yet, though he doesn't want Karkat to think he can claim that particular piece of apartment to himself. Just... he'll push it this evening, after they're back from their first ever patrol. Just not yet.

\--

"Karkat, lunch!"

"Fuckhead, ugly monkey."

"... What."

"I thought we were playing I Spy."

Dave shakes his head sadly over the just-microwaved leftover pizza. "That is so not how I Spy is played."

"Maybe it is where I come from, you racist piece of fuckslime."

"I'm buying that like it's on clearance and the End of Days is next week, dude."

"Mnh."

Dave would keep snarking if Karkat sounded irritated, but the distraction is unexpected. He pulls himself off his couch and cranes his neck to look up, climbs up a step.

The blinds are open; Karkat leans on the low windowsill with both hands, long body stretched out, spine arched. One mantis leg reaches far behind to brace against the floor, the other hanging bent, relaxed. His stunted wings are wide open, as if trying to catch a wind that won't be found indoors.

There are seagulls flying outside.

Dave sneaks back onto the floor as silently as possible, grabs his camera. Toggling the settings comes easy, he doesn't even need to watch his hands. He pushes himself back up on the lowest step, aims, snaps.

Karkat flinches at the shutter noise, whirls; he sees him and bristles like a cat, wings and spines up, retreats to the far corner. All his sheets and blankets are off the mattress and shoved and arranged into a huge nest back there.

Karkat's eyes really do glow in the dark; Dave snaps a picture of that, too.

"Come and eat something, you assbutt. Does pizza offend your delicate tummy or something?"

He drops off the ladder, cradling the camera to his chest. The second picture will be mildly interesting, academically so, for all that it'll look like baby's first photoshop once put online. The first one will be straight up gorgeous. The composition, the lights and shadows on that alien anatomy, they're technical reasons why, but the feeling -- the yearning -- underneath...

[ ](http://asukaskerian.tumblr.com/post/39330136741/manyblinkinglights-thank-you-tumblr-user)

Also, dat ass. Wow, do that stumpy tail and those hard, shining scales halfway up his thighs enhance the eye-grabbing power of a literally plush rump or what. Huh. Those sure are human-shaped glutes.

Karkat growls grumpily at him from the top of the ladder. Dave casually steps away, officially to let him get down if he wants to and not at all because he needs to not look at his face for the next couple of seconds.

"Oh, yeah. That camera is off-limits. This is an order, Karkat. You do not mess with the camera, or anything used to produce photographs, or my films, or my finished products, or my photo albums."

"Want to go get an encyclopedia and a thesaurus to see how many vaguely neighboring words and concepts you can add to that list?" Karkat asks, and bypasses the ladder to jump straight to the floor, landing with a thump no louder than if he really was an obese Persian. The wings, sadly, don't slow down the descent any.

"Sounds like a plan. You're so helpful, crabby, all my gratitude." Dave finishes putting the camera safely away and turns to face him once again as he sits. Karkat watches him from the other side of the coffee table. Dave waves a slice of pizza at him. "Want?"

With a little underwhelmed moue Karkat picks up a slice from the box -- by the outer edge, so the toppings slop back into the box. He hisses his offended betrayal at them and fussily picks them up to put them back on his crust.

"Roll it up like this, dude."

"I _figured_ , I'm not stupid." Refusing to look at him, Karkat starts to chow down on a pizza tube. He looks more determined to vanquish the thing than interested in the taste.

Doesn't stop him taking another slice, and a third, and a seventh. "You got a secret stomach compartment in your thighs or what?" Dave has to ask, as he sips on his second mug of coffee of the day and admires the pizzassacre.

Karkat licks the pad of his thumb and uses it to methodically pick up crumbs and escaped bits of ham. He eyes the crusts Dave abandoned in the other box; Dave tilts the box and lets them roll toward him wordlessly.

"If that's not enough I got cereals and stuff in the kitchen, I think. Rather see if you're gonna get sick off this, first, Jane was saying something about watching out for that."

Karkat hesitates, frowns, puzzled, to himself. "... No, it's fine."

"Water?"

"I know how to operate a sink, fuck you very much."

The verbal hostility comes across as mandatory instead of heartfelt. Dave would almost be sad. Not really. "Alright. So this afternoon we're going on patrol in the borderlands. You know what that is?"

Karkat looks up at him, all four eyes trained on his face and now he's more grave than over the top annoyed. "The weaker parts. Before the, nrgh, you don't have the right words."

"The weakening of planar realities? The dimensional muddle-point? The--"

"Just call it a hell gate, fartbreath."

It doesn't look like a gate. It's really just an area in town where the laws of reality like gravity, Euclidean space and the melting point of ice tend to fuck off in weird directions, until they fuck off altogether and then your guts are somehow on the outside or your brain made of sand and you're fucked.

It's been spreading. At a crawl, but twenty-three years' steady expansion are nothing to sneeze at.

"Okay, so, patrol time. If you notice other embodied demons, tell me. You're the only official one so it means everything else out there is either Class Ones or Twos looking for dinner or some asshole humans playing with things they ought to leave the fuck alone."

Karkat tilts his head, eyes narrowed. "And then what?"

"We kill them." Dave puts his empty mug down. "We try to take the humans alive and as uninjured as feasible. But using a demon to kill people with is -- you know what, do you even care about all the legal human stuff?"

Karkat's face closes off. "No." Damn, looks like he did a little bit. "Find, kill."

"If demon, find and kill. If human criminal, find, capture. Maim or kill only if the alternative is a police officer or a civilian getting injured or killed. Protect civilians from harm. Those are your orders, Karkat Vantas, Knight of Blood."

Karkat shivers from horns to tail. His wings quiver, translucent membranes shifting red over clear, wine-in-water red.

"Yes, Master."

Dave breaks eye contact first.

"Anyway. Usually I'm partnered with Jade but since she did the summoning yesterday she and Rose are too wiped to go out, so we'll be going with John." He gets up, gathers the pizza boxes. "What else, wow, I'm getting senile in my old age, I'm sure there was something else... Latula?"

She just giggles at him, the minx. _Chillax, firetruck, it's coming right up._

Dave nudges at her. Nothing. He shrugs it off and goes to the kitchen to throw the boxes in the garbage chute. Recyclables? Never. Between his laziness and Mother Earth he knows which wins.

Someone unlocks his front door. "Knock knock, it's the plumber!"

"Oh no, Mr. plumber, let me throw a bathrobe on as I drip seductively over your manly physique and impressive wrench," Dave throws back. He walks back out of the kitchen, only to find his demon and his temporary partner staring each other down. Well, Karkat is trying to stare John down, John is smiling in greeting.

"Hey there, wingy fella."

"Hey there, deformed maw." To Dave, without breaking eye contact; "It's not his home, that's breaking and entering, right? I can eat him."

Dave ambles toward them and nudges Karkat's side with his knee. "First, he didn't break in, he has a key. Second, do you really want John poisoning."

"... Seen like that."

John laughs and steps in, offering his hand to shake to Dave -- and then to Karkat, who stares, baffled. John crouches before him, wiggles his fingers. "C'mon, it's not hard."

"You use a joy buzzer on him, I will let him maul you. Fair warning, John."

"Oh, I wasn't gonna! Come on, Karkat. Hi?"

Karkat hisses and retreats behind Dave's legs in confusion. Dave sighs quietly and shakes his head no at John before he can start chasing him around. John straightens up with a big sad heaving sigh that pretty much ridicules every single sigh Dave has or will ever emit.

"Next time!"

Karkat growls under his breath. "Next time you won't even offer me your diseased appendage, if you don't want me to keep it."

"Bluh, bluh. What time is it?"

"Twelve past one and thirty-five seconds," Dave answers without thinking. It is.

"Okay, good, we've got a little time. Where's your Polaroid camera, Dave?"

"Uh. Why?" It's always a good plan to ask with John.

John brandishes his very serious and professional briefcase and throws it on the coffee table, and extracts a couple of paper sheets from them. "Jade and I made you printouts to put up in your building!"

Dave examines one. Karkat is staring in mild alarm and looking like he wonders if he really wants to get involved.

"Hello, my name is KARKAT and I am not a stray demon! I am a POLICE DEMON and am absolutely safe to let around your poodles, children, and, sadly enough, your _John_ you can't put that on an official notice."

John waggles his eyebrows and grins knowingly.

"... Fuck you, you perfect bastard. Sadly enough, your mothers in law. I live with Detective Strider and am perfectly housebroken yeah right, let's call it that... blahblah phone number to call for more information, blahblah please don't -- pff."

"What does it say?" Karkat wants to know, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"Please don't pet me, I am a working demon and should not be distracted. As if someone's gonna want to."

John pouts. "I want to!"

"Go ahead," Dave invites. One second later, John's hand is on Karkat's head. Two seconds later, his fingers are in his mouth. "Whoops, did I forget to tell you he's spiny just about everywhere? Because... Spiny just about _everywhere_ , bro."

"You douche."

Karkat is frozen in a snarl, lips curled in outrage. He's not moving a single muscle. Dave can't even tell if he's breathing.

"... Karkat?"

The demon swallows convulsively. His eyes find John's fingers and oh, fuck, the blood.

Dave grabs his demon under the armpits and hauls him to the kitchen. (Ow, his back.) He puts him down in the far corner, out of sight and hopefully smell and any potential supernatural awareness.

"Okay, what the hell was that?" No answer. Eyes unfocused, Karkat shivers, croons under his breath. It's creepy. "Karkat? Karkat Vantas, _you're forbidden to feed on him_."

Karkat flinches. "--Fuck you, I wasn't going to. You already told me I couldn't harm anyone but criminals."

... Well, good to know he's covered that point at least.

Dave hesitates, bites his lip. Rose told him he'd have to, he just didn't know how often. He accepts that. (But Karkat's hot mouth on him, his little shivers, the flickers of pain as his snake tongue flicks against his cuts.) "Do you need to, uh, I've got a pretty sharp knife, I could--"

For a second Karkat looks almost panicked, and then he bristles all over. " _No_. I don't want your rancid sludge." He shoulders past Dave, charges out of the kitchen. Dave throws himself after him, but Karkat has bypassed John entirely. He makes his way up the ladder in two bounds and is gone from sight immediately.

"Um. The heck?"

"Never mind," Dave says with a sigh. "Want a coffee?"

"Sure," John says, confused but willing, and they spend the next five minutes sipping and waiting for Mr. Demon to calm his chitinous tits.

Once John is done, Dave calls, "Karkat? Come back down now. Gotta take your picture, you're gonna be a real star."

Karkat oozes down the ladder with all the reluctance of a three year old and the gravity-defying acumen of a bat or a lizard, what with going head first when his legs are way longer than his arms. His long claws are wrapped all the way around the rungs.

John passes on being creeped out. Dave is creeped out, but he's kind of a fan of the feeling, so he just enjoys the uncanny valley shudders.

"Oh, wait, I almost forgot the essential ingredient!" John says as Karkat is sitting disgruntled on a corner of floor. He pulls out a blue cloth... thing... with a police shield printout pinned on the sides.

"I'd have gotten him a Kevlar vest but his wings wouldn't fit, so this is just a quick cloth thing. We're gonna have to make him something better adapted, but for now..."

"Wow, you think of everything. Tell me the truth, it was the girls, right."

John chuckles and rubs the back of his head. "... Yeah, um, Jade says Kanaya wants to make him something but I figured you guys wouldn't be up for that today."

"Will you assholes stop talking over me like I'm not sitting right here. Have I suddenly gone intangible? Fucking awesome, then it won't break any contract if I backhand my way through your faces."

John looks sheepish. "Yeah, yeah, sorry." He holds out the cloth. "You gotta put that on over your back, it's so people don't shoot you on sight in the street. Not that there should be a lot of locals where we're going but somehow people hear 'dangerous area' and they think it's code for hobo paradise or 'the government is just trying to steal your house for no good reason, quick, sneak back in'."

Karkat looks immensely dubious as he watches John approach, so Dave takes the cloth from his hand and steps in. "Mnkay, put that around your neck, okay..."The cloth floats over his wings and down his back like a cape. Dave crouches and makes Karkat sit up straight so he can knot the ends together around his stomach.

(Mngh flat demon belly. He tries very hard not to brush against the softer parts.)

The end result looks as professional as a kid's bed sheet cape looks heroic. Dave purses his lips. "Cute."

"Yeah," Karkat sneers back, "just one problem."

"No, no problem, picture now and _then_ problem. Don't move."

He stops moving. Dave grabs the Polaroid and snaps a couple of quick three-quarter pics, not his best work by far but they're well-lit and will provide good ID. Even if Karkat looks goddamn stupid in that blue thing.

"Okay, now what problem."

Karkat rolls his eyes, all of them, and then he flicks his back spines. The cape shreds with barely a noise. Tatters rain down around him. Karkat sits there, arms crossed, long shreds of blue cloth still running from neck to stomach.

John _pouts_. "Aw, man. And you couldn't... _not_ do that?"

"When I have to _fight_?" Karkat shoots back, incredulous, and rips the rest of the cloth off him. "Hey, I have an idea, go stand outside in the wind without those ridiculous glass shields and don't blink even once! You can imagine doing that? Okay, good, now do it _weaponless_. Rot-for-brains."

John glowers, thwarted. Dave sighs. "So repurposing one of my t-shirts would work just as well. Dress pants cut off at the, uh, knees...?"

"Tail, asshole. Also the belt would still go over my spines. Wouldn't last."

"Okay, fine, you're Mister Happy Naked Demon. We still need to make clear you're not for target practice, so any smart suggestions?"

John taps his lip thoughtfully.

"John, whatever it is--"

"A police cap!"

"--no. Also, no." Naked demon? Is natural state of demon. Naked in a cap starts looking vaguely fetishistic for some dark reason that Dave is quite happy never to shed light on.

"Fuck no," Karkat is snarling. "You are _not_ covering my horns!"

"Aw, but you barely have any!"

"Rrrrrrrhhhst."

"I think that's demon for not even in your dreams, bro." Dave sighs. He doesn't like what he's going to suggest next, but. "Karkat. Your neck spines don't really flex, do they."

"Not as much," Karkat admits, frowning suspiciously. Dave sits on the coffee table and looks at him for a minute.

"We'll hang my shield around your neck. Gotta be something fairly short, so it won't swing and hit you in the face and people can't grab at it. And fairly thick so it can take the weight."

Karkat's face is doing something complicated that Dave can't untangle.

"... So, a collar."

"Yeah."

Karkat doesn't answer, but his eyes are incandescent with powerless rage. Dave nods to himself and gets up, and climbs the ladder to go looking for that braided leather string he used to hang seashells off of, last time he and Dirk and Bro went on their pretending to be surfers vacation.

Karkat still hasn't moved by the time he gets back down. Dave extracts his badge holder from his belt and threads it on the leather string, crouches to wind it around Karkat's neck.

He makes sure it tucks close along the duller bottom of the cervical spine, makes sure he can slip two fingers in it so Karkat can breathe (though the hard shell bands around his throat make the concern stupid), makes sure it's knotted right and won't come undone.

Shield gleaming over his sternum, Karkat looks like if he even so much as breathes too deep he'll give into his deepest Dave-murder desire. Dave gets out of his space.

"Time to go," he says, and goes to strap on his Kevlar jacket and stuff his pockets with mechanical watches.

John looks sympathetic, but he has the good sense not to say anything.

They only cross paths with one of Dave's neighbors as they put up the placards, and he's so drunk he only blinks and then passes them by with the look of the guy trying real hard to ignore a ridiculous but persistent hallucination.

\--

"I know I told you to kill it dead."

Karkat gives him a disdainful look and sits on cracked pavement to groom. He does not give a damn that they're still in the no man's land, and another Class One could jump them in the next second. He's grooming now and that's it.

Dave stares at him. At the Class One. At him.

"But this is not _dead_."

When he saw the rogue demon -- some kind of unidentifiable oozing slime with like a hundred eyelashes fluttering along its sides like its underside would probably be a giant eyeball, he thought, hey, this is easy enough, let's see how it goes. He told Karkat to go. Karkat went.

Right around the corner.

By the time Dave and John turned the corner after him...

"This is _extra_ -dead."

The mess takes up the entire zebra crossing. It looks like nothing so much but red, vaguely chunky puree.

"This is dead with a side of bacon and a supersized drink."

The puree was garnished with petards.

"The bacon is also, thankfully, dead."

There is pureed monster up to the _second floor_ of that nice, innocent, thankfully abandoned preschool.

"It looks like you killed that dude, and then you killed its pieces. Because they weren't dead enough. And then you killed the dead pieces again for good measure."

"Mnh."

" _What in the little Jesus' name happened?_ "

Karkat keeps grooming. He's scowling at the humongous mess splattered all over his front and sides and speckling his wings, but sometimes he'll glance at Dave under his bangs and spare a secret smirk.

John is ambling around the crime scene, hands in pockets, humming a made-up song under his breath. It goes "There's no kill~ like overkill~" Dave seriously considers making it a theme song.

"Jesusfuck on a tricycle. Come along, let's find out if there's still water in there."

He's an employee of the government. He's allowed inside a school. He breaks the lock with a swift kick and walks in, Karkat mincing his steps behind him. His claws creak a bit on gravel and broken glass but the grossest noises are by far the little splat-splat-splurts he makes as the mess slops off him. John trails them, and secures the next rooms once they've found a kiddie-sized bathroom, with tiny door-less stalls and borderline knee-high sinks.

He tries a couple of faucets. Eventually some rust-tinged water trickles out. Some homeless dude or other must have fiddled with the plumbing to keep it flowing. No skin off his back.

He's pretty sure this close to the hell gate the water might give any mundane feathers or maybe throat tadpoles. Maybe melt them. As a summoner he's pretty resilient to that shit, and as a demon Karkat should be the closest to invulnerable, so it's not like it matters. He gathers water in his cupped hands and splashes it on Karkat's chest. This has the effect of diluting the mess so that it can trickle more freely over the velvety cover on his thighs and pool in the cracks of his shell.

Ngh.

"Okay, you just... do your thing." Dave gestures vaguely toward the door. Karkat is watching him with the most cynical face ever. "I'll be... securing the building. With John."

"I thought you didn't want to leave him out of your sight again," John says as Dave hauls him along by the arm to the next corner, where they stop to admire some dust-caked kiddie murals.

"Meh. He can wash alone, I'm sure. Look at that, is that a dinosaur or a giant dodo, can't people leave dinosaurs alone with their 'they were feathery all along, let's be historically accurate' bullshit, that's just not scary enough to be real cool. They're killing it, John, they're just killing it."

John laughs.

The shadows wind around his ankle like a noose and fling him through the wall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fanart in the story by [manyblinkinglights.](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com)
> 
> More (potentially spoilery) fanart by various people can be found on my tumblr under the tag [fanart for me](http://asukaskerian.tumblr.com/tagged/fanart+for+me/) (just scroll past the Battlefield Terra and 30th Century stuff :p)


	4. Chapter 4

_Jump_ , says Aradia. Dave does. She freezes the passing air for him, catches him over the return lash, but the molecules are fragile and there's a ceiling, no escape through up there. Inside his head Damara starts to laugh.

 _Ain't shadows for realz_ , Latula says, _just a bitchin' disguise -- don't you mess with my ride!_

Huh. The squinty blur disappears. He sees tendrils, mottled brown and green. Vegetal or squid, who the fuck even cares. He raises a hand, holding a wristwatch; it crackles Technicolor in a way that makes his eyes tear up. Jump, air-step; bring his hand down, throw the watch.

The tendril explodes into a puff of dust; so does the floor below, linoleum cracking and curling with brittle age, cement turned to sand. Fuck.

It's dark under there and things move in the dank and dim. Aradia manages to slow down his fall, one second, and then the strain gets too much and he has to let her go.

Something snatches his wrist, hard enough to bruise to the bone, yanks him so that he doesn't fall straight down but goes swinging into the wall. The impact leaves him winded, his shoulder screaming in pain. He kicks at the wall, weakly at first, to try to scramble up, get some leverage to tear free. What the fuck harpooned him?

Oh. It's Karkat. Karkat is flat on his stomach in the intersecting corridor, claws like a bracelet of thorns around his wrist. He's gritting his see-saw teeth, wingtips braced for leverage against the moth-eaten bricks at the edge.

"What the _fuck_ , you asshole!"

Dave huffs out a breathy laugh. His ribs are bruised. He braces against the wall with his feet, tries to help Karkat pull him up. He's pretty sure his shoulder is out of its socket.

Something winds around his ankle, slithers its way up to his knee. It's room-temperature, not slimy. It finds the bloodied hole at his pant knee; Dave's skin burns with fire-ant prickles.

"That's _my_ fucking life support device, you piece of moldy shit!" Karkat yowls, and lets go of the edge with his non-Dave holding hand.

Something red gathers in his fist.

The tendril shakes Dave against the wall, knocks him against bricks and rusted-through pipes. He's blind with pain.

Something sizzles past him, down into the hole. There's a screech. He begs for his leg to be released. Instead he's given another furious shake. He feels like the wishbone caught between two kids, and he's terrified both that Karkat will let go, and that he won't, and Dave will be torn in two.

Karkat doesn't let go, not even when the next shake dislodges him as well and they both fall.

Impact. It feels like falling onto bales of hay, not soft but by far not as bad as it could have been smacking into the floor. This is suspiciously good luck.

Damara is still laughing. Okay, it's actually anything but good luck.

He bets they're on the monster.

Karkat tackles him like a scaly, hard-edged, miniature freight train; they roll, land in fifteen inches of brackish water. Things whistle past them in the air, like a flurry of whips.

"I owe myself five bucks," he says, and tries to grab onto Damara, but his mind is weak and he's used up power too fast and she's contrary as always, it aches. He lets Karkat back him into a corner as he squints.

Faint light from the hole in the ceiling illuminates the basement, weakly so. The monster is...

The monster _is_ the basement.

There are tendrils running on _every_ surface, some more or less spread, disappearing in canalizations, there's, oh, there are huge hot water boilers cracked in two lengthwise and laid like car-sized, vine-loved bathtubs, things floating...

"What's in the water? Karkat?"

"Bones," Karkat says, absently, and rakes the air with his claws as a tendril comes closer to their hiding place.

Dave's pretty sure the tubs are not the ideal spa. He does not fancy becoming monster-plant soup. He wants out of this hole, or failing that he wants a flamethrower. He picks up a brick and flings it hard as he can left-handed, to no visible result.

"Can't you do whatever you did to that eyelash thing--"

Karkat twitches, and for a second his wings droop. "Used it all up," he mumbles.

Brick dust flies to their right as a tendril lashes at the wall. Dave pushes Karkat down before that shit cuts them in two. And then they're stomach down in cadaver water and the tendrils are patting over their heads searchingly, tap tap tap, slowly crawling closer along the walls until they surround them entirely.

Dave sighs. "We are so fucked."

Something haloed in blue comes crashing through the ceiling. The monster goes into writhing, frothing madness. The thing in blue is flung back up (the ceiling cracks), yanks a, _oh lord is that a support beam_ , comes back down swinging.

Swat. Swat.

Swat.

Stillness.

John props the bent girder against his shoulder, stomps his hoof a last time on a tentacle in its death throes, and calls. "Guys? You okay?"

"I thought you were dead, you unremitting bastard," Dave yells back, a bit scratchily.

"I thought _we_ were dead," Karkat says. "Fuck you right up the eye socket and into your frontal lobe for wasting so much time jerking it _strongly_ , you nasty trash."

"Vantas, I will ask you to refrain," John/Equius says. "Seriously we just saved your a--your _behinds_ , gratitude's okay in my book, and a modicum of respect on top, yeah, if you please."

Dave drags himself back up on his feet somehow. He hurts everywhere. He hurts when he moves and when he's still and when he breathes. (When he doesn't breathe, well, he's _not breathing_ , which is also a problem in itself.)

Dave draws in a breath. It hurts, but he just has to say it. "I take it you guys know each other."

"No fucking duh, your prize is a thumbtack to sit on and twirl," Karkat says.

"I have this grave misfortune," Equius says at the same time.

Dave nods. "Okay, cool, high school reunion. Hey, Karcrab, think you can still run?"

"... Maybe, why?"

"Cause the ceiling's about to come down on us."

\--

The sudden hole in lieu of school was not subtle; they don't have to wait long out in the street before a support team drops by, with a healer/first aid team. They pop his shoulder back in manually and plaster him in healing talismans and heating pads and deliciously chemical painkillers; once Karkat has snarled at them enough they even agree to drop the three of them at the police station, but only because Dave's pet demon would upset the other patients.

(The support team that came to secure the area for them were more scared of Karkat than the first aid dudes were. Dave already has a mental note to never get between a doctor and his patient, from watching Jade and Jane in action; he underlines it. In fluorescent.)

Anyway. His car is still parked somewhere by the borderlands. He gives his preliminary report and oozes into Mrs. Paint's car (she is the _nicest_ secretary ever, he is buying her _so many pastries_. He makes sure to tell Karkat not to fuck up her car, but Karkat just eyes her warily and stays oddly silent.)

A couple of neighbors are waiting for the elevator at the same time they are. Dave says hi and when Karkat growls at them he says it's just a demon way of saying hi and Karkat says stuff about it meaning hi now get in my belly; it gets them the elevator and his neighbors will get over it, they always do.

He fumbles with the keys (his shoulder still aches deep; he'll have spectacular bruises all week) and stumbles in, Karkat on his heels, and then he finally, finally peels out of his eau de corpse-soaked clothes. His jacket goes first, and his shirt, which he pulls up over his head without bothering to figure out the buttons, and then his boots which he toes off and his pants which he kicks down onto the floor. (They have a bloody hole at the knee, he'll have to trash them, oh well.) In his underwear, he stumbles bathroomwards.

Hn. Wait. Karkat is just as dirty as he is; even worse, because he still has some red puree splattered on his wings and stuff. If he goes up to his nest now...

"Karkat, come here. Shower time."

Just gathering the concentration necessary to make it binding makes his head ache a bit. He pushes the door open, drags his feet in oh dear lord why is there no chair in the shower, he would stay there _forever_.

He steps in, presses his forehead against the tiles, turns on the water.

The cold doesn't even wake him up, it just aches and makes his skin feel too tight, until it warms. He squirms out of his sodden boxers, lets them flop sadly on the shower's floor, toes them into a corner.

"Karkat!"

He frowns over his shoulder, and Karkat is there in the doorway, unsure, Dave's shield glinting brassy-gold on his gray chest. There's enough water drops flecking the glass to obscure his face already.

"Come in and close the door. M'not letting you roll around on the furniture when you're so gross. Come on in."

Karkat closes the bathroom door behind him and pads closer, slowly, carefully. The shower stall door is still open; Dave turns the water down so it won't splash his face and pats his own thigh encouragingly.

Karkat crawls in, presses against the glass wall; there isn't that much space, especially if he'll insist on not at least sitting up. Dave closes the glass door behind him, unhooks the showerhead, and slides down the wall to sit on the floor.

Karkat sits up beside him, awkwardly; their shoulders touch, there's no helping it. It's not bad; he's warm even through the chitin, living warmth even though his hide is smooth and unyielding. Dave swishes the showerhead over both their chests in turn.

He hasn't got the dexterity to undo the knotted leather at Karkat's neck, and Karkat's claws would ruin the thing entirely. Maybe afterwards.

"First day from _hell_. I swear they're not all like that," he mumbles. Karkat's head is bowed; there's red mush in there, too, Dave frowns a little as he considers the logistics.

Karkat says, "I'm hungry," very quietly.

"Hn? We'll find you something when we come out. I dunno, maybe cereals, or I've got that package of sausages that shouldn't be too badly out of date..."

Karkat shakes his head, and he growls. When he looks up his face doesn't look angry, though. It's something worse. Dave's stomach twists, without knowing why.

"He gave me pastries. Your boss. It didn't -- I'm still. I."

Dave blinks slowly, tilts his head back so he can rest it on the tiles while still watching Karkat. "You're..."

Oh.

Yeah. Karkat did use quite a bit of power out there.

Fuck. Uh. "I don't have a knife on me, urh, maybe -- can you wait until we get out, I'll get a knife from the kitchen--"

A slow shake of a dark head. No eye contact. "The healer told you no more blood loss for at least a week."

It's the way there isn't even an insult tacked on that gets to Dave strongest.

He licks dry lips. They're a little puffy, probably from being slammed into that wall repeatedly; not worth being healed, just bad enough to sting.

"What's your price?" he asks, quietly, like someone might be spying and find out, like he's not the one this should be hidden from. Karkat's nostrils flare, his jaw tenses, he turns away.

No answer.

Okay. Staple diet then. Blood or sex, and blood is out.

Okay.

"I, uh. I usually do that while the demon, uh. Rides me _fuck that sounds dirty,_ but I mean, we're mentally connected so they can get at my, at the energy I give off, but you and I aren't really connected very deeply like that, is that going to be enough?"

This is so dang awkward, wow.

He stares down at Karkat's long alien limbs, his vicious claws and the stabby bits on every joint, the glimpses of red tissue visible between the plates, apparent tendons and too-long heels, strangely articulated knees and inner thighs like shorn velvet.

"I don't know," Karkat barks out without looking his way, "might come as a _surprise_ to you but I've never been incarnate before! Fuck, I haven't even merged with a human fucking _ever_ , I don't even know how that one goes -- _if you ask one of yours I will strangle you with my own intestines_."

Dave lifts a hand in surrender. "Okay. The girls are banished from my headspace starting now. No peanut gallery."

He thinks about it, absently showering his legs, toes spread. He might be exhausted and awkward and uncomfortable but there's still something warm slowly coiling in his guts, something tempted.

"Let's test it from lowest setting to highest."

Karkat blinks at him like he's speaking in Russian. "What?"

Dave is the one who looks away, cheeks heating. "I don't want to go straight to fucking you if, like, a hand on my thi-- my shoulder as I jerk it would have been enough. If it doesn't work, well, I'm too tired to get it up twice in a row, so blood option for today."

"Do you have any clue how much power you'll have to channel if you want to alter the 'do not hurt or cause hurt to happen to Dave Strider, Knight of Time' rule?" Karkat asks, biting. "Even a little bit? I'll have keeled over from hunger by then."

Dave breathes out. It comes a little growly, irritated. Karkat sneers back.

"Nope. I'm not going to let you die from such a stupid issue, so stop being stupid, stupid."

Okay. He's the master here. He has to decide. He has to act first.

He curls his fingers around his limp cock, rubs his thumb over its plump length. Karkat is staring, the way you'd stare at someone petting a slug. It kills his concentration.

"Fuck's sake. Here. Hold that." He thrusts the shower head in his clawed hands. Karkat fumbles it; it sprays all over Dave's face. Dave blinks furiously, wipes at his eyes, starts laughing.

He's pretty sure the slightly louder breath Karkat let out was a runty, baby laugh, too.

"You're supposed to become blind _after_ you masturbate, Jesus, let me at least commit the sin first."

Karkat makes a noise that might be acknowledgement, or just nothing. "...It just looks so _ridiculous_. All this -- that... you ever look at your own flesh and think, how in this forsaken universe did this agglutination of meat cells even come to exist? It makes no sense."

"Dude, do I look like Rose to you," Dave says fussily. "Are you trying to kill the mood just as dead as that Class One, for serious, don't bring up existential philosophy at a time like this. No etiquette, I swear."

Karkat bites his lip (Dave is sure to keep from smiling) and headbutts him in the shoulder. His hair spines must be down because it doesn't prickle. Dave is reminded of the red mush still in it, though, ew.

He makes sure to rinse his cock-holding hand before reaching up to pet Karkat's head. Only polite, even though it's not like he's oozing contaminated phlegm down there. Karkat tenses up at the touch, a little confused.

"Shh, just washing your hair. Huh, it's really thick. And no prickles yet, guess I should just always go along the grain, yeah?"

He ruffles it gently to loosen encrusted stuff and rinses with the showerhead, careful not to get any water in Karkat's eyes, any of them. He pushes waterlogged bangs up and back, off the demon's face, and looks at them, wine-red and gorgeous.

He kisses the bridge of his nose, because his mouth, that'd be too much.

The fur-stuff is dense under his lips, and short like a buzz-cut, a bit like the back of Dave's head after he gets the underside shorn to a single millimeter. It almost prickles, but not quite.

When he opens his eyes he's looking straight into Karkat's smaller pair. Heh. They glow faintly. He winks. Karkat blinks back.

"Damn but you're cute."

Mister Happy is coming back to work. Good, okay.

"If you find the fleshy stuff too weird, you could just close your eyes. Just... try to feel my energy, see where you could get it, maybe." It will kind of suck if they've managed to create a demon who has no idea how to feed itself -- worse, who has the hunger but not the ability to satisfy it.

Karkat growls under his breath and headbutts him in the temple, not hard enough to hurt but certainly enough to feel like a clear ' _cut the yapping already_.'

His eyes are closed.

Dave takes his dick in hand and starts pumping, long and slow. Karkat still leans against his shoulder, turned toward him, though his head is bowed. Dave could nuzzle his hair, if he wanted pinpricks on his face.

He's warm like a little furnace, and he's so _weird_. The way he moves, the way his body feels, his unreasonable number of sharp ends, his everything.

Dave doesn't have the mental strength to visualize a thumbnail of his soul imprint right now, much less a detailed map. He tries anyway. This is Karkat. This is everything that's Karkat. Maybe if he tugs on the bond Karkat will figure out how to follow it back to him, to the life energy threaded all through the pleasure slowly, stutteringly rising in his belly.

Dick hardening in his hand, Dave finds his thoughts pulled from Karkat's soul back to Karkat's body -- those wings, wanting to feel the translucent membrane on his own skin, wanting to see them flutter in pleasure -- that tail, he wants to get under it, he wants to feel the scales against his belly when he --

There's a hand on his thigh, hard and armored, four knifepoints prickling in just over the big artery, and he's gone.

He feels Karkat shudder against his side; he feels him push, nudge, trying to get closer when they're already skin to skin. Dave lifts his hand off himself, wraps it around Karkat's shoulders, over the wings, in-between spines that slice warm stinging lines into his skin.

It wasn't the greatest orgasm, strictly speaking -- didn't rise very high before cresting, he's too tired -- but here and now, in the shower stall with that warm, weird body against his... Karkat is purring, he thinks, or maybe it's a croon, a growl, all of the above, bass crickets and motor noises and rattlesnakes, it goes up and down between irritation and hopeful pleading.

Karkat turns under his arm; his spines rake Dave's arm and they both flinch.

"I didn't mean--" "--It's okay."

They stare at each other. "I can -- test things out," the demon half-asks, half-reminds. Dave nods.

The next second he has a chitinous hand cupping his spent cock, claws curling ticklishly under his balls, and a hot mouth plastered against the oozing scratches on his upper arm. He grunts in shock; he's too sensitive right now, it feels good in a pretty bad way.

Karkat's croon is turning mellow, though, appeased. Dave endures it, teeth gritted.

A last spasm of pleasure leaves him. Karkat's hand reluctantly lifts off him, though he keeps lapping at his cut biceps like he's hoping for more. Dave nudges him.

"What was that, bro?"

Karkat blinks owlishly before he remembers himself; he leans back, sits up against the glass wall. "I -- I could _feel_ it, but, I don't know if I needed to be touching you more, or in some other way, or if I just need to use your blood as a conduit. If I'll have to use your blood as a conduit every time." He's chewing on his lip, brow furrowed. "I can't tell which it is. At least I only needed a few drops..."

"Mnh." Dave manages a shrug. "Gonna have to give the data to Rose and Dirk, see what they think. Later. I just..." He stares up at the basket hanging up there with the shampoos and shower stuff. It could as well be on the moon. "... let me just rinse my hair--" and uh, his jizz, he supposes, "and then... fuck, you'll probably have to help me to the couch, and then I'm sleeping in until tomorrow."

Karkat hands him the showerhead back. Dave rinses his thighs, manages to lift his hand high enough to do his hair too. He's utterly weak all over; he was tired when he came in but this is ridiculous.

Dave makes him turn off the water. He leaves the showerhead hanging. Karkat pulls Dave up on his feet, stumbles awkwardly along on his back legs, one wing wrapped around Dave's back now he's too tired to think much about the feel.

He leans against the wall to towel mostly dry, wraps himself in his best bathrobe, such a bright red, so deliciously plush and warm and he doesn't even care that it says My Favorite Pimp on the back.

[ ](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/post/39741165847/whoops-my-hand-slipped-and-i-seem-to-have-drawn)

Karkat helps him to the couch and he flops right there, burrows in the cushions. Mmh.

"By the way... You get enough food, dude?"

Karkat grimaces faintly, shrugs. "I'll live."

"Shit."

Dave starts trying to sit up. Karkat shoves him back down, not too gently. "I'll be fine until you wake up, at least, and then we have to find another way. Now get some rest already, you king-caliber moron."

Damn it.

He can't do jack shit about it now, anyway, there is no way in any plane of existence that his dick is going to want to be touched again anytime soon, and ordering Karkat to bring him a knife, or _just fucking bite him_ goes against his core programming. Dave doesn't have the juice to rewrite that.

Demons don't do self-sacrifice, he reminds himself, especially not the forcefully bound ones, so if Karkat says he'll be okay until morning he probably means it. Dave gives a little sigh of surrender and closes his eyes.

Before he falls asleep his last thought is that damn it, tomorrow he'll sleep upstairs in his own goddamn bed once again. This time, really.


	5. Chapter 5

He has a headache when he wakes, which doesn't presage many good things for today. There's a few forks back on the floor, but half-heartedly. He eyes them from the couch and doesn't move. It's... _Nine past nine and nine seconds_ , Aradia informs him. Okay, he's pretty sure she woke him up. She likes patterned numbers like that.

He bends at the waist, rummages under the couch, finds a candle in the offering box. There's a little shelf over the armrest where he put his head, usually for the TV remote. He puts the candle on it, looking at it upside-down. She's not asking him to do that, he's just refusing to sit up for real.

 _I don't mind_ , she tells him, soothing and amused. _Time flows the same way upside-down!_

 _You're the best, babe_. Neck draped over the armrest, temples beating a slow, aching tempo, he watches the candle drip upwards.

Sixteen past nine and sixteen seconds. He blows it out, closes his eyes, and dozes.

Someone is staring at him. Bnurgh.

"Go 'way, Karkat, 'm not stepping on any legos for you today."

Karkat fails to go away.

He also fails to say anything. Dave cracks open an eye, bleary-eyed, hair in disarray.

Karkat is on the coffee table, doing the cat loaf pose, limbs tucked in under his body. Staring a hole into his head.

[ ](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/post/40493898438/cat-can-opener-stare)

"Fff. What."

No answer. Just more inscrutable staring. Dave is almost tempted to say fuck it and let him stare his fill as Dave snoozes mightily, but there's that armored chest, that chitinous breastplate his shield hangs over in the shadow under his throat.

"Uh. Hungry?"

No answer, but his upper eyes squint like he wants to look away.

Well. Uh.

Great.

 _Okay, self,_ Dave tells himself, _you're a twenty-three year old male, you're about to get off,_ _show a little enthusiasm._

"I'm. Pretty sure you at least have to touch me. You wanna test what happens if you're... I don't know, sitting on my legs?"

Straddling his lap. He could do that -- fuzzy inner thighs pressed down heavy on Dave's thighs, ankle spurs nudging his calves, smooth crotch so perfectly alien a few inches from Dave's not-so-smooth own crotch -- and watch as Dave jerks off. That'd be kind of okay in Dave's book.

"We did that yesterday," Karkat replies, finally deigning to speak, and his eyes slide away in a way he's trying to make disdainful and uninterested. "Didn't work until I had blood to lick up, and by then you were pretty much done already. I don't even want to think about how much energy you just wasted away in the ether, it makes me want to bite things. Especially things shaped like your ugly pug face."

Dave wishes there was a way to have already talked to Rose and Dirk, already have all their analysis and advice -- without actually talking to them. If he could get it back from the future to right now, too, that'd be swell.

"You wanna get on the couch with me?" he suggests, voice gone a little rough despite himself.

Karkat stares at him, only this one comes subtitled with ' _idiot_ '.

"You realize if I can feed on lust and sexual pleasure then I can _notice_ it, right? Be a bit useless to hunt for it blind."

Dave had not, as a matter of fact. He blinks. "... Yeah?"

"Why do you keep _suggesting_ , why don't you just order me? You could even do that breeding thing, that'd probably work a lot better."

Dave chokes on his own spit. Karkat doesn't even look that much angrier than usual, mostly annoyed at Dave.

"Do -- do you _want_ me to--"

"I want to feed." Karkat's eyes narrow slowly, and for once he doesn't look hilariously over the top, he doesn't look adorable -- he looks cold, remote. Predatory. "This is the one thing I was promised. Knight to Knight. The one thing I took from you."

His wings flick; he resettles them on his back. He makes Dave think of a sphinx.

"I want to feed and not die."

Fuck. Yeah. Okay.

Demons don't work without terms. The odds are overwhelmingly in Dave's favor with this contract, but.

If Dave doesn't feed Karkat, Karkat is going to kill him. He won't be able to (won't even _want_ to?) feed by force, with all the restrictions, won't be able to bite and drink or force pleasure out of him, but Dave will be an oathbreaker.

Dave bites on his lip. He already knows the answer to this question, but he points it out anyway. "You don't actually want to have sex with me, though, right?"

Karkat's voice goes all low and almost musing, eyes less and less impressed. "I didn't want to be shoved into a meat costume and sewn in, either, and yet."

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Karkat's so grumpy-cute, such a housecat, how did Dave already forget that no, actually, he's a fucking cave lion. "You took the blood of your own will," he reminds him, pushing himself into a sitting position.

Karkat's eyes narrow some more, and he hisses low and long, but he doesn't fly into the kind of rage Dave expected. "And so I did."

Fuck. Okay. He needs to feed Karkat. Karkat is kind of _fucking terrifying_ right now.

Blood? Blood would be nice and safe. Blood would imply that Karkat hasn't taken the healer's warnings to heart and doesn't decide to protect him from himself, Dave's starting to realize there might be some leeway in the terms there. Also to get a knife he'd have to manage to get past him, when he's so nicely corralled in, tucked in the corner under the mezzanine.

Sex would require him to be the kind of twisted bastard who can get it up for a monster a hair's breath away from saying fuck it and disemboweling him for breaking his promise to provide basic sustenance.

Welp.

He's blaming Bro for this one, somehow.

"Come on," he says quietly, throat scratchy, and he reaches out with both arms. "Come here."

Karkat unfolds from his sphinx crouch and slinks to him, stalking cat, suspicious and ready to rend and tear. Dave slips his hands under his armpits and pulls him onto his lap.

His breath is so hot on Dave's neck, he's dizzy with it. He slides his hands around his back, traces the cracks between chitin plates, finds the roots of sharp spines, oddly articulated. He wonders if Karkat can even feel it. The demon's hands hang at his sides, his long clawed feet hang from the couch's edge against Dave's calves.

He tilts back into the couch, at an angle, pulls the demon down on top of him. Karkat is heavy, full of hard edges. Dave will come out bruised.

"Is this really okay," he whispers in Karkat's ear, hands crawling up under his wings to pull his chest closer.

"You have my name," Karkat reminds him, like it means everything.

It does.

Dave has his name. Dave has _him_. He could do anything.

He's hard against Karkat's belly. It's not as soft and giving as he thought it would be, it's not mammalian flesh. It gives a little but more like a really thin but still rigid sheet of plastic.

"I don't want to hurt you."

Karkat barks out a sarcastic laugh. The curl of armor plate over his cheekbone is pressed into Dave's jaw. "That's nice."

Dave closes his eyes, arches his neck, almost offered. "Do you want--"

"Your orders," Karkat whisper-growls into it, "Master."

Dave presses his palms against the back of Karkat's shoulders and just holds him tight for a little while, and then he nudges and tugs his legs free, hooks his knees over Karkat's hipbones, tucks his heels under Karkat's ass.

His bathrobe has fallen open, he's naked underneath. He rolls his hips against Karkat's belly, trying to keep it slow.

He's not going to fuck him, he doesn't even know if there's a hole to fuck into. He's not going to order him to suck his cock. He's just going to... "Move with me," he orders, eyes closed, burrowing his face between Karkat's armored neck and his blade-tipped shoulder, and doesn't delude himself into thinking that it makes it that much better.

Karkat tries to match him and his rolling hips; he's clumsy, but that's okay, it means Dave scratches his inner thighs against the edges of his hip plates, it means there are impacts, cock to whatever passes for a pubic bone in his demon. Slowly Karkat moves his arms closer, so he's holding onto Dave's shoulders in turn, the inside of his forearms pressed to Dave's biceps, and that -- yes, Dave wants that, the closeness, almost being held, their whole bodies pressed tight together -- Karkat heavy on him, muscle and sinew and bone.

He presses his heels into Karkat's ass, pushes his hips harder into him, imagines what if, what if he did have something to fuck Dave with, what if Dave could tell him, _pound me_.

He curls a hand over the back of Karkat's neck, feeling the braided leather strings, threading his fingers over and below his cervical spines, nudges Karkat's mouth to his shoulder -- not the collarbone, no, the muscle behind that, that runs from nape to shoulder.

He winds his mind around lava and acid and ancient rage, and he orders, _bite_.

(He doesn't know if he does it with his mind or his voice.)

Karkat's teeth bury in his flesh; he jerks against Dave, like only after obeying does he realize what he's done.

Dave comes like a freight train with cut brakes, pain burning from his shoulder on down and hitting, transmuting straight to pleasure. It flips a switch somehow; the strength of the sensation is still there, so deep it aches, it stings at the edges and parts of his body are still telling him this is bad, get away, he's getting _damaged_ , but the rest just wants more.

He managed to lift Karkat from the couch, arching his spine that hard. He lets his strained body go limp, slumps back into the cushions. Karkat pulls his teeth out of his shoulder and stares at him, eyes a little wild.

Okay, _now_ it's starting to sting but good.

Karkat is hovering on hands and knees over him. "Lick it up before it stains the couch," he mutters, eyes closing almost despite himself.

"I--"

"It didn't hurt at the time." He cracks an eye open. Karkat's face... Dave raises a hand, nudges his shoulder a bit. "You got your vocabulary at least half from me, dude. Look up pain slut. I guess that's a loophole you didn't expect, huh?"

Karkat shudders, blinking rapidly, and then manages a grumpy growl. He leans down toward his neck. Dave cracks a minuscule smile.

Karkat nips his jaw in punishment.

He's already licked half his shoulder clean when Dave is done being startled. Oh. "... Okay, that was -- that was nice too. I -- not much harder, but that? That works for me. Yeah." Shit does it work. It's... in a pretty feral way, it's _cute as fuck_.

"Shut up," Karkat grumbles against his skin, and presses a palm against his forehead to shove him back down on the cushions.

He grooms, and grooms, and keeps grooming; it stings and aches deep where he managed to bruise the underlying muscles with his jaws. (Dave's lucky he didn't bite a mouthful of muscle straight off.) Dave stays quiet, lets him, shivering when Karkat chases a stray drop to the hollow between his collarbones.

"Still hungry?" he asks when the wet flickers of tongue against his skin slowly come to a stop.

Karkat sits up, straddling his knees. He stretches his arms over his head, exoskeleton plates moving smoothly over each other at the edges, gaps expanding to flash underlying blood-red muscle or tendons or whatever else; he reminds Dave of a smug cat. "Mrrrrh. No."

There's white spunk splattered and smeared all over his smoke-gray belly.

Dave stares, somewhat dumbly.

"What?" Karkat frowns down at him, hands coming back down, though now it's his wings that he stretches, far to the sides and then back, cupping the air like he's doing a butterfly stroke.

"Congrats, you just won first shower. You tell me you can handle a sink, good, go handle a shower stall." He tugs his mussed up bathrobe out from under Karkat's knees, drapes the edges modestly over his limp baby batter cannon. "Don't make a mess, yeah? I'm just going to... Rest. Some. Yes."

Karkat stares at him weird, but goes, slowly getting up from the couch. Dave's legs are cold where he was straddling him. He pretends to close his eyes, but he watches his demon walk away, tiny tail suddenly quivering before the demon decides himself and bounds forward for the bathroom. Fucking adorable.

He waits to hear running water before he gets up and goes, crossing the halfhearted field of floor forks to get the first aid kit from the kitchen, to clean and bandage the bite.

Latula is, of course, whistling at him from the peanut gallery called his frontal lobe.

\--

Rose calls while he's finishing up in the shower. He stumbles out, damp and terry-wrapped. At least the shampoo is safely washed off already, so when his bangs slop in his eyes it doesn't sting too bad.

"Hey twinniepoo," he says as he checks the clean clothes hamper for work clothes. (Like hell he's gonna bring his clothes up to the mezzanine every time. He'd just take them back down anyway.) "Whassup?"

" _Good morning, Dave. Can you bring back that book I lent you? Someone else asked for it._ "

"The vampire one?" he asks, pulling out clothes and dropping them on the coffee table for review. "Sure, just let me pull it from under the table leg." He lies, of course, the book is safely on the shelf by Aradia's old candle. "Shit, gonna have to get a phone book now to replace that shit -- ow."

" _Ow?_ " she repeats pointedly, and great, she was about to hang up and now he can tell she won't let go until he spits it out.

"Tried to tuck the phone into my shoulder. So I could clad my nubile snow-white ass in Force blues. It's nothing, just, uh, stuff from yesterday's mission."

" _You realize even if I hadn't long since learned how to tell when you lie, I have a Seer of Mind at hand._ "

... Bluh.

" _Dave?_ "

Bluuuh.

He tucks his phone against the other shoulder and awkwardky wriggles into his underwear. "I told Karkat to bite me," he mutters. He wanted to ask her about shit, right? Right. "The cuddlebuddy masturbation wasn't cutting it."

" _Ah._ " She makes the thoughtful little tsking sound that always goes with her nibbling at her lips. He refrains from telling her she's ruining her lipstick. " _No, it wouldn't._ "

Dave stops with his pants halfway up his knees, slowly sits down on the coffee table. (cold ass, brr.) The shadow of Karkat's wings flutters close enough to tell him he's listening in. "Huh? Okay, that's something that would have been fucking nice to know for sure _before_."

" _I did not_ _know_ _it before. If you'll recall, we mentioned the possibility. Most succubus legends have the succubus actively doing things to the victim, not -- ah._ "

Rose pauses in mid-sentence.

" _Ah. I see. You might have pointed that out before, Kankri._ "

"What does that asslord have to blather about this time around," Karkat growls. Dave jumps a little to find him halfway down the ladder.

Karkat's hair is still damp from his own shower. Dave drops a hand on his head between two round, harmless horns. (He makes sure to smooth his hand along the grain of his hair, and still prickles his thumb on a quill going the wrong way.)

Karkat allows it for a few seconds, and then shakes his head. Dave takes back his hand and turns up the sound, to be polite.

" _Sympathetic magic relies heavily on symbolism,_ " Rose is saying, voice resonating in that way that means her eyes have gone hazed over with fresh arterial red. " _For a demon to receive your life-creating energy... Makes sense it would convey the power better if the method at least partly mimics a way that might potentially give life._ "

Dave stares into nothing. Karkat is frowning like Rose is speaking gibberish.

"It's not like I can even knock him up," Dave protests. "Why the fuck does it even matter?"

" _Exchanging blood works doubly well in our specific case because of our Aspect,_ " says Kankri with Rose's voice, " _but for an embodied demon, the most relevant part was the symbolic piercing of your flesh by Karkat's teeth._ "

"Great, I bottomed too," Dave quips without thought; the beat of silence afterwards tells him that Rose is arching an eyebrow. His face heats up, suddenly persuaded that she totally knows that yeah, actually he did. (Except not, does it even count as bottoming if you're ordering the other guy to do it.)

" _That you did, dear brother,_ " Rose says, and he hears a thin and teasing smile in her voice and knows she's going to hold it over his head just about forever. " _By the way, I am reliably informed that this was not a guess, but an actual--_ " she makes her voice carnival fortuneteller spooky -- " _Seer thing. Terezi confirms that Kankri is absolutely certain._ "

Dave's throat is a bit dry. He looks down at the demon, small horns and small wings and shelled armor bands and spines and grasshopper legs and a grumpy, pouty face turned his way in that already familiar what-the-hell-Dave way.

Giving Aradia a clock works well enough. Giving her his actual time -- long moments spent on nothing else but gathering her presence in his mind, spent on her only -- works better. Teeth work as dick metaphors, therefore an actual dick ...

"We gunna have to frick."

Rose's wincing pause is so subtle if he didn't know her so well he'd probably miss it. " _I think other methods would still work, just not as ... efficiently. But if you want to get rid of the bloodletting crutch at least long enough to let yourself_ _heal_ _..._ "

Well.

Rose is right. It was on the table from the start. He's cool with it.

Totally cool with it. Haha.

"Why'd Kankri not know before?" he asks. He doesn't really _care_ why, he just. Haha. Ha. Fuck or starve. Awesome.

Kankri-in-Rose huffs. " _Because_ _before_ _you did not have my_ \--"

" _Kankri_ ," Karkat hisses, desert heat and deadly sunlight resonating in his voice, in Dave's head. Endless thirst.

"-- _Aspect compatriot. That was not what you were going to say,_ " Rose finishes; but Kankri apparently refuses to say any more.

Dave looks down at Karkat. He didn't know the demons could do that to each other, too. "So... You know Kankri's true name, huh."

The glare Karkat spears him with drips with disdain. "We're going to be late."

Shit, he's right, Dirk's gonna be waiting downstairs already. "By the way, you totally did not sidetrack me!" he promises. (Hell no, those thoughts are going to keep him company all day.) He yanks his pants up and throws his shirt and jacket on, open. He'll button up in the elevator.

The elevator is totally not old and grindingly slow and absolutely does not give him any time to think about that conversation again.

\--

Dirk is waiting on the curb for them. Dave doesn't bother saying anything about how he could have come in through the garage; he strolls out of the front door with his hands in his pockets and Karkat on his heels, and fuck the passersby.

He ushers Karkat into the backseat, tells him not to damage Dirk's car, doesn't bother to tell him to stay on the seat; Karkat sinks in the leg space straight away with a little challenging glare and then curls up and drapes a wing over his head.

It's like he's daring Dave to order him to sit up properly, to buckle in, to pay attention to him on his own.

It's like he knows if Dave does--

Eh. Okay. Dave sits in front. Dirk pulls away from the curb.

"How're you doing, lil' bro?"

"Still alive."

"You sure? You barely look it."

"Yeah, yeah."

"Nice bandaging skills, by the way. That sure was on the laundry list of injuries I read about."

Dave lifts his head off the comfortable headrest and glares halfheartedly over his shades. "Were you looking at my reports again, you creepy stalker."

Dirk doesn't bother looking apologetic.

"I'll live," Dave tells him, and rests his head against the glass to end the conversation.

He wants to tell his bro, hey, so, I kinda fucked my demon and it was awesome and now I'm starting to feel like a real asshole.

Dirk's probably going to be _logical_ at him though. He'd rather wait until the official Detective-Summoner reunion and lay out his concerns -- no, "concerns" makes him sound like a pussy; reservations? that'll do -- lay them all neat and logical and clear. Ethical stuff.

Hey so I humped him and I think I mind more than he did, because he already maxed out on resenting me before I even put my hands on him.

They drive in silence the rest of the way.

Dirk is either kind enough or evil enough to drop them off at the front steps, instead of going to park underground; Dave can't tell if he doesn't want to upset Karkat any more than cars already upset him, or if he's trying to improve general officer fortitude by forcing them to deal with Detective D. L. Strider walking his pet demon.

Karkat stares suspiciously at just about everyone they cross paths with, spines rattling subtly -- except at Mrs. Paint who's helping the front desk this morning; when she waves hello he flinches.

"Do I even want to know."

"You say that like any knowledge you gain won't just dribble right back out of that stunted, hole-ridden flesh lump you desperately try to remember how to lace up your shoes with."

Some guy too harried for the elevator pushes the staircase door open; Karkat is slinking past his legs in a hot second, making him yelp and dump half his coffee on the steps. Dave sighs and follows. "Sorry, dude, tornado coming over. Hey, Karkat, we say sorry when we knock into someone, okay?"

"Demons don't lie and also fuck you in the face, I didn't even touch him, not my fault he's a weenie."

Dave shrugs helplessly at the mildly hyperventilating guy and takes the next flight three steps at a time. Karkat is already out of sight and he'd rather not let him get too far. "Liar, you lie all the time. You... lying liar."

"It's that thing called hyperbole, maybe you've heard of it -- oh hey cupcake smell, that's the door, right?"

"Considering with the next flight of stairs we'll be on the roof, yep."

He takes a little breather on the third story landing before coming in. Fuck, but he's still exhausted from yesterday's fight and this morning's... this morning, and a little jogging in a staircase isn't really helping. Karkat hasn't tried to open the door and go first, though it looks less that he's waiting for Dave and more that suddenly he doesn't want to go in.

"C'mon, we're dropping by my cubicle and then going to the reunion room. Can you find my cubicle, by the way?" he asks, as he remembers what Karkat said the first day about his soul having left tracks all over it. Karkat doesn't answer, but he grunts and trots ahead the second the door is open, zigzagging through the alleys. Yeah, he can.

Someone picked up his paperwork nest under the desk. Sad. At the same time they also removed the damaged bottom drawer so now he has more space underneath. He slinks in to check it out. Dave bites his tongue lest he commit the sin of publicly going aww.

Maybe he should buy him a dog basket to sleep in. It'd end up in shreds pretty fast but they'd be comfortable shreds, ideally.

"Hey, pardner," Jade says over the wall. Something goes bonk under the desk; Karkat peers out to glower at her suspiciously. He looks a little alarmed to see someone propping her elbows on their back wall. Dave waves at her before Karkat can get it into his head to get territorial about parts of another officer of the law sticking out into Dave's space.

"Hey, pardner," he replies, with the proper accent this time around. Jade's attempts to sound Texan are always adorably off the mark.

Not that Dave is any more Texan than she is, technically speaking, but Bro and Dave's father were, originally, and so that means Dave is _culturally_ Texan at the very least. His _soul_ is Texan. He is so completely Texan they wanted to award him a special state citizenship the day he was born, only then the hell gate decided to act the fuck up and probably vaporized the messenger. Probably due to his birth as well, to be honest, just too much rad bursting out into the mortal world, the universe had to equalize the pressure.

Jade smiles, all bright, and then she turns it into a narrow-eyed scowl. "And now tell me what you've done."

"... Uh?"

"You look like _shit_ , Dave. _Microwaved_ shit even," she clarifies with delighted outrage. "With sprinkles on top! That only makes the shit look even more like shit, okay, you can't misdirect people like that."

"Wow, I am mad amounts of flattered, quick someone catch me before I swoon. It's not like I got hammered by a Class Two yesterday or anything--"

"Yeah, and I had a talk with John about that already, the nerve of him getting my partner all banged up, see if I'm letting him borrow you again."

Dave wonders if he'd have liked being there while Jade reamed John for letting him get damaged on his watch. Nah, she'd have turned on him next. "Yeah, okay, noted, no more mad partying with John behind your back, we always bring the house down."

She snickers. Victory. "That one was kind of lame. Okay, I'm coming through, wait a sec."

"Why do you want to?" he asks, but she's already leaving her cubicle and circling the block to get to his door. Karkat's eyes glow red from the shadows under the desk.

"Because Dirk told me about the neck wound!" That traitor. "And even if he hadn't, seriously, I can see the bump under your shirt, Dave, I am not in fact blind."

She steps into Dave's cubicle and makes him sit down, spares a little smile and a wave at Karkat who hisses warily and hunkers down.

"Okay, now show!"

"Bow-wow." Sighing, Dave unbuttons the first two buttons of his shirt and tugs the collar open to show her the bandage. She unsticks one corner to look underneath.

"Wow, that's a pretty nice bruise. Let me get Feferi and I'll fix that."

Did she not see the gigantic bite mark. Did she miss it by some miracle. Should he point it out. Um.

Thwap to the head. Ow. He guesses he deserved that one. "And I should leave that gaping hole open, that would teach you. You gave Karkat blood again, didn't you?"

Jade looks worried, even as her lips purse in concentration. He sighs. "Yeah. Might as well leave the scab alone, be easier to reopen it in case he needs a drop than to make a brand-new cut. I know it's against medical advice but seriously, his aspect is Blood, shouldn't be a surprise that it doesn't work right without."

She stares at him, green eyes unimpressed to the max. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather I _install you a spigot_."

He catches himself thinking about it for real. Okay maybe not a spigot, but one of those things they put in at the hospital for people they don't want to stick a hundred times in a day so they just leave the needle thingie in, what are those called... Yeah, he wouldn't mind that.

"Dave." A long, heavy sigh. "The only reason I'm not hitting you again is that you obviously can't afford to lose anymore brain cells today!" She grins, sudden and bright. "You're _way_ over quota as it is."

Her skin is shimmering with rainbow scales, so he decides to stop pushing it before Feferi cheerfully bites his head off for real.

It feels really good when his shoulder stops aching and stinging. He hadn't quite realized how much even the weight of his own arm aggravated the strain. He rolls his arm in its socket, rubs the muscle from his neck down. There's still a series of scabbed-over small holes, but they don't go as deep anymore, he can tell.

He almost wishes it would still hurt, but that is an emo thought and, if said out loud to Jade's face, also a potentially suicidal one. He shoves it down.

"You're awesome. Can you fix my back while you're at it?"

Jade purses her lips, runs a hand down a couple inches from his skin. "Nuh huh. It's mostly muscle strain, you'd be better off with a massage and a couple days of not lifting heavy crap and getting thrown into walls."

"I'll get right on that, Doc."

"I mean I can try, but it's not big obvious trauma, Jane would be better with it."

Bluh. Dave doesn't like bothering Jane with his little booboos; she's the best healer in town and she's in such exhaustingly high demand with the cops and firefighters that they've had to put in an official waiting list that you can be kicked out of if your leg is judged not broken enough, and everyone and their grandmother still tries to bribe her to sneak their bunions in. "I'll deal."

Why does he have a job again. He wants to be home and napping and blasting music so loud he can think of exactly nothing at all. Especially the no thoughts thing. That'd be swell.

Oh right, innocents getting munched in the streets and destruction of existence as we know it. "Whoops, it's ten thirty, time to go to that meeting. Karkat, come on."

Karkat slinks out from under Dave's desk, still glaring at Jade, and when she smiles he dodges to the other side of Dave's legs, hissing quietly and rattling his spines. It's funny for a few seconds how wary he is of her, and then Dave remembers she was the one who forced him into flesh and it's not as funny anymore. He reaches for Karkat's head, stops himself. Who is it consoling, that gesture, really, Karkat or himself?

Jade looks at him a bit weird, but he just dodges into the reunion room before her.


	6. Chapter 6

Captain Egbert and Arne Revere, the City Attorney, are already here, and so is Rose; Dave leans in to shake hands and drags a chair out for himself, and then John bursts in last.

"Very good," Captain Egbert says. "Close the door, Detective."

It always amuses Dave that half the time Egbert Senior's detectives are "son" but his actual son never, lest someone accuse him of favoritism. Then again it's already pretty iffy that he has his son under his direct command, it's only because John's a summoner and they only have one division for them that it's even allowed.

John sits by Rose; Karkat ogles them all over the edge of the table for a few seconds and then sits on the floor, borderline under the table.

"Karkat?" the Captain says pleasantly. "People came to discuss you. Please sit on a chair, if that isn't uncomfortable."

Uh. Now Dave feels a little like a dick, for letting him stay on the floor. But the way Karkat moves so easily on all fours, the way he hides under the furniture, Dave didn't even think about it. He was thinking, he doesn't know, that Karkat just likes that better...

Karkat looks up at him with a frown. Dave shrugs.

"Detective Strider?" Revere says pointedly, eyebrows furrowed in disapproval. Dave sighs.

"Karkat, wanna try the chair?"

A glare.

"I'll bribe you with a cupcake."

"Don't want your putrid, tooth-killing cupcakes," Karkat grumbles back, but he tugs a chair into place and pulls himself up on it, placing his hands on the seat first before he shifts his weight up and perches cautiously, a little sideways to accommodate his wings. His jaw is tense as he stares at his watchers in turn.

John smiles and waves at him. Karkat hisses back, but Dave can see his wings; they're relaxing.

"Is this how you usually command your demon, Detective Strider? Seems a bit lax."

Dave's eyebrows furrow before he can stop them. "I command him when it's important. Sitting on a chair isn't. He can talk from the floor or the ceiling lamp and we'll still hear him fine."

... Great, now everyone is staring at him. Even Karkat.

He knows he overreacted. Just...

"He's not a dog or a pony so I'm not making him put on a show of human politeness. If he wants to be polite our way, I'm sure he knows how. Is all."

Bluh. The more he explains and the more he sounds like a defensive asshole, even though he makes sure to keep his voice nice and even; they know him too well for that to help.

Karkat huffs, ruffles his wings, getting everyone to look at him instead. "Might as well. You promised me a cupcake."

Dave blinks and then cracks a minuscule smile. "Thought you didn't want it, bro." Karkat glares at him.

"I _don't_ , but you still owe it to me. Going back on it now?"

Rose chuckles. "That would seem rather unadvisable. Going back on a promise..."

( _Knight to Knight. The one thing I was promised._ ) "Hmm." Dave makes a show of considering it, somehow. "Nah, don't feel that suicidal today. Cupcake it is. Blaming you for the addiction, sir, by the way."

Egbert chuckles. "Fair enough. Now back on topic...!" He looks over at Revere. Revere makes sure to pin him and John equally with his dark glare.

"I'd like to start this meeting by thanking this precinct for utterly failing to keep the property damage to a minimum. Again."

John coughs in his hand. Dave pinches his lips.

"If you would please explain how unavoidable it was, so that I may explain it to the Board of Education and Department of Public Works in turn."

Dave sighs. John gives him a little shrug. "I gave the preliminary report yesterday, bud."

Yeah, okay, that's fair. Dave starts in on his report. Parked at this place, patrolled this and that streets...

"We encountered a Class One near the intersection of Sunset Drive and Fourth Avenue. The demon looked to be fairly low-level even for a Class One. I made the decision to let Karkat handle it, but I failed to order him to stay where I could see him before he gave chase." Not a mistake he'd make twice. "As a result he expended quite a considerable amount of power on the Class One."

Egbert Senior tilts his head; Dave pauses, guessing that he wants to interrupt.

"That would be the... tomato muck swamp?" he says, looking at his notes and repressing a smile. Sounds overblown in a report but it's as good a description as any for the royal mess Karkat left behind. "Karkat? Any reason...?"

"He didn't tell me not to," Karkat grumbles, though it's clear watching him that he knows it was stupid of him. Egbert lets it pass, so Dave does as well. He can guess the real reason; Karkat was angry and wanted to break things and this was the only target they'd allowed him. He doesn't want Karkat to be forced to admit it.

"Not a mistake I'll repeat, either, sir." Egbert gestures for Dave to continue, so he does. "Since Karkat was, ah... Let's go with extremely unsanitary--"

"Which means?" Revere asks.

"Which means he was wearing half of the Class One in the form of a liberal coating of finely mashed flesh."

Jade lets out a rather inelegant _snork_ in the palm of her hand.

"Anyway, I judged that due to the number of homeless people in the area we might find running water in the abandoned school at the corner. Preferably before the flies started homing in." Stern Rose look. Right, proper police vocabulary. Blergh. "We entered the building and found a lavatory. I left Karkat to finish washing as Detective Egbert and I went to secure the building--"

Oh, the _stares_ he's getting there. It's really hard not to fidget when he can see everyone has the same _what were you thinking_ look on their faces.

"The same demon who had just caused an incident when he left your field of vision."

Revere's lips are pursed.

"I admit that was a lapse of judgment on my part." He was too busy ogling Karkat's inner thighs to think of procedure. So not telling them that. He's already annoyed enough at himself. "We were in the process of exploring the corridor when the Class Two snatched Egbert with a shadow-blurred tendril and threw him through the concrete wall. I engaged the tendril."

That sounds so stupid said like that, wow.

"The Witch and Maid of Time provided aid, but--" Damara was a bitch like always... "--The floor of the corridor was destroyed in the process. Karkat arrived at that point and kept me from falling, but more tendrils burst through the opening and pulled us down. We managed to evade following attacks but on account of my wounds and Karkat's magical exhaustion we couldn't retaliate until Detective Egbert came and finished it off."

The end. It sounds more like his fuckup than Karkat's, which is, he reminds himself, exactly what he wants. (On top of being true. It's not Karkat's responsibility to guess at what Dave forgot to order him to do and do it anyway.) They're going to wonder if they chose the right person to control the embodied demon, but it's not like Karkat can change masters. They're hopefully not going to decide that the experiment was a failure and needs terminated.

"So what have we learned?" Captain Egbert asks. John lifts his hand like they're at school.

"Don't ever let Karkat decide his own setting, he's stuck on overkill."

"Fuck you in one ear and out the other one," Karkat replies, charming as always. John grins, actually charmed.

"I was teasing, buddy." He turns back to his father and Arne Revere. "I think next time he'll remember we might be attacked at the next corner. He was probably just excited because it was his first fight."

"You know what would _probably_ get you an actual answer? If you let me speak for myself, you rusted piece of idiocy-fueled babble machine."

Everyone stares at Karkat. Dave breathes out. It aches, this in-between.

"Unless you don't want to hear what the fuck I've got to say, in which case what am I doing sitting at this table."

To his credit, Revere doesn't flinch at all, even though Karkat is bristling and his voice low and full of snake hisses and weird crackles. "No one will listen to you if you keep being this rude and unmannerly. It goes both ways."

Rose's irises briefly redden, but she doesn't let Kankri speak to Revere. Dave can guess it'd be about tone policing and silencing and oppression. Seriously, Kankri must be the only demon _ever_ to care about ethics.

Then again, Karkat may well care some, though perhaps only when it's about him? Dave can't say yet.

"Detective Strider?"

The thing is, Revere is right, as much as it sucks, demons are already scary and their way of thinking is odd and counterintuitive to most people, blatant hostility doesn't help.

The thing is, Dave could order Karkat to be polite, and to be friendly, and to smile and even _mean_ it, and he could order him to like Dave's hands on him and where the fuck does that stop.

"He can speak however he wants. It's what he does I bound him for."

He stares ahead, at the wall between John and Rose's heads. He doesn't want to look at Karkat, who no doubt is furious that he's being graciously offered something that should be his by right.

"That might cause some problems in the future, should you ever have to testify."

Dave shrugs. "Then it'll cause problems."

"You might be ordered to make him quiet."

"I might be ordered to resign," he snaps back before he's thought twice. "Let's call it a major turn off, okay? The only time I'll ever order him to shut the fuck up is if it'll get us killed on the spot if he doesn't, and unless the judges in this country like to pop heart attacks when someone cusses then it won't be a f-- a _problem_."

Okay, now everyone's staring at him. This is not a good thing. This is so not a good thing. What's wrong with him? Haha, joking, he knows the answer to that one, he'd have to be daft to miss it.

"We'll have a word in private after the meeting, son," Captain Egbert says, measured and calm, and Dave feels his stomach sinking.

"Yes, sir. Sorry for the language."

"Well." Egbert Senior nods, determined; topic's closed.

Revere is frowning and no doubt wants to poke his pointy little attorney nose in this, but after a last puzzled glance he decides to drop the topic and pick up his papers again.

Karkat kicks his leg, too lightly to hurt (because he can't do that) and sneaks him a look through dark bangs, puzzled. Dave nudges back with the toes of his highly polished shoe. The contrast with Karkat's thick chitinous claws and weirdly exposed tendons makes him want his camera.

"Let's talk about property damage."

John groans under his breath. Jade rolls her eyes at him.

"And exactly how necessary it was... You used that Heir of Void, didn't you?" John nods. Revere frowns at him. "Didn't you have any other demon at hand?"

"Well, when it put me through the wall the only reason I wasn't squished into paste was that I've got Equius on retainer just for that sort of thing, and once he was riding me it seemed a waste of time and energy to dismiss him and call someone else. Plus I don't think Breath would have done much underground, I mean, I could have floated over the damage but the demon was rooted all through the basement, I wouldn't have shifted it."

"Hmm. How about floating and getting your teammates to safety, and coming back later now that you knew about the lair? A Class Two wouldn't think to move once discovered, would it?"

Karkat snorts. "We were all the way into the corner, surrounded in tentacles, about to be squished into paste. Hurts me physically to say but if the moron hadn't killed it on the spot then we'd be a lot of putrefying meat right now."

Revere huffs. "Are you absolutely sure? Not that a demon would know or care, but I expect Detectives Egbert and Strider to know better; buildings cost money, _public_ buildings cost even more money, and there was no reason we couldn't have reused the building once the hell gate was closed."

Karkat stares at him like he's daft. Dave nudges his foot before he can talk.

"Sir, that place was six blocks away from the gate. Wouldn't have been long until the murals came off the walls and started gamboling around with the desks, not to mention the warp on every single trace of metal, including the foundations. It was good as bulldozered already."

Revere sighs, shoulders slumping a little bit. Captain Egbert pats him on the shoulder sympathetically. "There, there, Arne. The gate won't be closed in the next ten years at the very least, let's be realistic, there would be a lot of buildings to remodel or even raze and rebuild entirely."

"Mnrgh. There could have been people inside," Revere grumbles halfheartedly, "maybe those homeless people who turned the water back on--"

"There were people," Karkat interrupts. Everyone stares. He stares back, making a show of looking bored. Dave prods him in the side, though he only manages to hurt his fingers on his shell and to get Karkat to stare at him with 'moron' written all over his face.

"It'd be nice if you developed that a bit, Karkat," Jade says, frowning at him, lips pursed.

Karkat stares at her, eyes narrow, but in the end he breaks eye contact first. "In the tubs. They were all bones, though. And ghosts. Did you want the ghosts?"

Dave groans. Oh god, that soup. "Yeah, okay, we know where the hobos went."

... the demon was making soup. Even if it was only as smart as a raccoon, letting its prey dissolve in water for fertilizer...

"The demon too. If it had eaten us it would have been a person." A not-so-careless shrug, red eyes hard. "Not that that counts."

Dave's brow furrows over his shades. "No, okay, this is where I draw the line, I refuse to give a shit about the personhood of someone trying to have me for breakfast."

Rose interrupts before he can get far in his staring contest with his demon. "By 'it would have been a person' do you mean it was about to evolve into a Class Three?"

Dave and John groan. " _No_ , Rose," John says sternly, "we are _not_ contemplating the sad fact that you missed a study option, did you want to feed it and see what happens?"

"Bro, it had _appendages_ , that answers your question right there."

"Guys, you're _horrible_ ," Jade says, laughing anyway. Captain Egbert clears his throat pointedly.

"I merely found it interesting that the Knight of Blood would show interest in the potential personhood of an unknown demon... Even more so a hostile one." Rose's eyes crinkle. "Especially because the Seer of Blood is currently giving me a very detailed tirade on that very topic, yes, Kankri, I am in fact listening to you."

Karkat stiffens, makes an _aw, fuck_ face. "... Tell him he's a ranty fuckhead and it's his own damn fault."

"That I drew a conclusion? Hm. I can't help but wonder why you seem so determined to hide the attributes of your Aspect, I can think of no other Aspect so fiercely defended."

"Bam, there's your attribute. Science triumphs. Now put your sniff holes back on your own ass and stop getting all up in our business, if you'd be so kind."

"Ahem," the Captain says. "Arne? Anything else?"

The attorney shakes his head no.

"Very well. The destruction of the Class One hints at a good potential for use, but so far you have not seen Karkat's combat abilities with your own eyes...?"

Dave shrugs. "Well. He's pretty quick on his feet, and he's got a solid grip. Not Equius-wearing-John strong, but failing all else, there's that."

"Besides," Rose adds, and she sneaks him an oddly apologetic look, "I doubt you would have seen him at his true potential yesterday no matter what. He'd just been incarnated. You would have to feed him pretty steadily for a while for his true strength to show."

Yeah, Dave'll get right on that. A nice long marathon fuck session.

They needed to find a demon no one else in the group was using, so as not to deprive them of a known weapon for one with uncertain returns; but the reason Dave volunteered was that if he hadn't, Rose would have. She had one in mind, even. Not as perfect a fit as a Knight of Blood is for Dave, but by inversion a Mage of Doom would have worked okay.

"Well. The group reunion is next week, we'll have time to collect more information. If there's nothing else to bring up?"

Dave and the other summoners chorus a no. Everyone gets up, shakes hands (except Karkat, perched on his chair like a gargoyle and observing), and they file out. He stays back.

Oh her way out his twin tells him, "Ah, regarding feeding..."

"I'll try not to dry out my veins." He doesn't say how hard he'll try.

(Dave's seen Rose flipping her powers inside-out once. He doesn't intend to see it ever again.)

Blood loss makes a body weaker, unhealthy, and there's no way anyone can sustain a demon for very long on that diet anyway. Sex costs nothing in the long run, humans were made to throw away the seeds of life like they're cheap plastic beads and the whole world is New Orleans.

It's not even a question of being more practical, the second solution is the only one that actually _works_. He knew that going in. He still knows it. (He knows it was Rose or him.)

Captain Egbert comes back from walking the attorney back to the elevator, closes the door quietly behind him. Comes to sit at the corner of the table, leaning in.

Karkat is between them. Dave wants him elsewhere, not listening. After his outrage over silencing his demon it makes him feel fake as hell, like he only allows Karkat his ranting because it amuses the fuck out of him, but as soon as stuff really bugs Dave...

"Son?"

He hesitates. Looks at Karkat. Karkat is staring back, frowning.

"It's an ethical problem," he manages to say, looking into his demon's eyes, and then his words all desert him.

"Ethics are for pussies," Karkat says.

Dave barks out a laugh, mostly because of how wrong, how much worse it is coming from him.

"Would you rather Karkat not listen?"

"I'm not sending him outside unsupervised," Dave replies, which is basically a yes.

Karkat's jaw tightens, he turns his face away. "Order me to sit in a corner."

"Yeah, I'll pass."

"Hm. That's quite the pickle." Egbert pulls his pipe out of his pocket, though he doesn't light it; they're indoors, the whole building is non-smoking. "Karkat, if there were no objections, would it be possible for you to be ordered not to hear?"

Karkat stares at him for a second. "... Try it and see."

"Does either of you have objections?"

Dave doesn't say anything, mildly ashamed, but if Karkat wants to object that's fine. His demon turns to stare at him, leans in to peer at his face, scowling.

"Did I do something wrong?" he demands to know, suddenly, without warning. Dave's throat attempts an emergency shutdown.

"No. I did."

Karkat's expression turns bitter, knowing. "And you don't want me to know about it."

"And I -- basically, yeah. Maybe later."

He's not sure how he can even dare to cup his cheek right now, pet it all soft and careful. He drops it back on his lap almost immediately.

Karkat just stares back like Dave makes no sense, and that lack of sense offends him. "What the fuck ever."

Dave decides that's as much consent as he's ever going to get from his demon. "Now would it work if I ordered you to not understand my or Captain Egbert's voices until I -- hm. Snapped my fingers? Would that be enough to end the order? Answer me truthfully."

Karkat's face is blank. "Yes. Master."

Okay. Yeah. Good enough. (It's not good at all. It's workable, though.) "Karkat Vantas. I order you not to understand my voice or Captain Paul Egbert's voice until I snap my fingers."

He growls at Dave and then he slinks off his chair, disappears around the corner behind Egbert, spines bristled.

"Karkat? If you understand, answer me." No response. Okay, as good as it'll get. He turns to look at his captain, who's still waiting patiently. "I..."

Throat dry.

"What, where, when, how, why," Egbert reminds him, and taps his pipe gently against the folders still on the table.

He tries on several ways of broaching the subject gently in his mind but none of them work. Okay, fine, whatever.

"It feels like I raped him." A breath. "I'll have to do it again."

Slow blink. "... Ah. When you... feed him. I was under the impression that all summoners engaged in, ah..."

Dave pulls off his shades, abandons them carelessly on the desk, stares down at his lap. "It's not the same thing. That's the thing, I thought it'd be the same and it wasn't. I..."

He tries to find words to give shape to something he can only feel. Not working.

Egbert looks uncomfortable, but compassionate too. "What is the difference? Where is it, exactly?"

Well, fucking duh, the difference is he has a body, how can anyone miss that.

And that body...

"Touching him," Dave ventures. Yeah, sounds right. "Making him -- if he could just feed from staying beside me as I -- managed on my own, that'd be fine, but it doesn't work nearly well enough. I'd starve him. Kankri just confirmed."

He rakes a hand through his hair.

"The other demons don't have bodies, they don't -- I'm not touching _them_ , I'm touching _me_. They're just enjoying it like a, a power boost, maybe a drug high, I don't know. They don't have parts to match, it's all freaking _metaphorical_ to them. It's not metaphorical to Karkat." His hands fist on his lap. "He's _here_ , he's inside this body, it's not just a wood puppet he poltergeists from in-between the planes all like here comes Lil' Cal, y'all best get a move on, he's --"

"Dave," Egbert says gently. "You are, I believe is the term, freaking out. Breathe."

Dave breathes. Laughs a little at the man using slang, even so mild as that; he knows Egbert knows the term perfectly well, he's just teasing, it's nice.

"Did you ask him what he thought?"

Dave's throat closes. "He said I had his name. Like... consent, not consent, what the fuck did it even matter, I could order him to consent if I felt like it, I could order him to become the kind of person who'd consent on their own."

Egbert is silent for a minute. Dave contemplates his hands, busy wrinkling the hell out of his stylish pants.

"He did take the bait on his own..."

"We tricked him, though. Shit was like waving coke under an addict's nose, like he even had time to notice the fine print."

Egbert hums, thoughtful, not convinced. How can he not be convinced?

"Fight fire with fire, the end justifies the means..."

Dave snorts. Egbert smiles.

"Quite. That is, if you'll pardon me, a lot of bull. I signed off on this because most demons see that kind of trickery as, shame on me, I'll do better next time, but right now you have earned this fairly from me. Karkat might be considerably put-out by his new situation, but I believe you should ask him if he truly does not feel that this is acceptable. He might--"

"It's not about what _he_ feels!" Dave bursts out, and then pauses as he realizes that's true. Well, he does worry about what Karkat feels, but in the end, even _if_ that one worry were laid to rest... "...It's about -- about me, _my_ ethics. What it means about _me_."

"What _does_ it mean?"

It means he's a pervert. It means he's not just thinking of England, he's getting off on Karkat's body. He laughs.

"It means I'm a sick fuck and I'm enjoying this. _God, I want to arrest myself_."

Karkat is suddenly on the table. Just leapt there between one instant and the next. Dave stares at him, too startled to shoo him away. He's on the table and he's staring holes into Dave's head again.

Karkat turns a suspicious glare toward the Captain as he slinks closer. Dave's fists tighten; he looks away. What is Karkat even doing here? "Do you understand what we're saying?" he asks. He wants to put his shades back on, but that'd be too obvious.

Karkat hunkers down slightly, reaches with his claws curled down and pokes Dave's shoulder with armored knuckles, eyebrows furrowed. He reminds Dave of a cat testing the aliveness status of insufficiently savaged prey.

"Your mouth is flapping. I certainly hope it's not at me, what a waste of saliva."

Dave lets out a short chuckle, more in acknowledgement than humor. Karkat tilts his head to try to catch his eyes, makes a little irritated grating noise when Dave doesn't let him. He bats his claws in Dave's direction without quite touching.

Heh. It almost seems like concern. Heheh. Yeah fucking right.

Poke. Poke. Karkat growls. "Stop making your energy wobble, for fuck's sake, it's not right!"

Dave's evolving into a perfect cat owner, going _oh look how he loves me_ when Felix worms its way into his lap, when he knows full well the cat's thinking _hell yes free body warmth and ear scritches_. Soon he's even going to buy his own bullshit.

He winds his arms around Karkat's neck and tugs him closer and he presses his face against oddly warm armor plates. He's such a fucking asshole. Taking comfort from the victim. Such a good cop he makes.

Karkat is frozen at first, and then he turns his face a little against Dave's head and makes a confused little murring sound. He huffs in annoyance in Dave's hair and nips his ear, and Dave is about to release him when he rests his pointy chin on his shoulder.

"... You're weird. Don't cut yourself on my spines again, I'll put forks everyfuckingwhere in the apartment."

Cat seeking warmth. Dave slides his fingers into wiry hair and porcupine quills, gives a scratch, almost as a joke. Karkat twitches, startled.

And then he pushes his head into Dave's hand. Oh.

"You can keep doing that," he says, a little brusque, "but after that I want my fucking cupcake. You promised."

Dave is laughing before he's really thought about it, more weird startled, confusing feelings than amusement but amusement anyway. "You're _such a cat_ , dude, you don't even know."

"And stop talking to me when I can't understand you, and if you're talking to the old human instead of me then fuck you. I better have sprinkles on that cupcake for putting up with your bullshit."

"Why," Egbert says, "this does sound like the cue for me to go make sure there are cupcakes left to provide."

Dave reddens. "Boss--"

"David Lalonde Strider. Just _talk_ to him. I'll have the cupcakes ready. Wouldn't want to lose a summoner over a matter of pastries, right?"

He leaves them alone, door closing quietly behind him. Dave sighs and lets his forehead flop down on Karkat's shoulder.

It might not be the real thing, Karkat tolerating him so close, but on the surface it's close enough to a comfort hug that somehow it makes him feel a little better, even if he knows he's fooling himself, even if nothing has been fixed. He gives his demon a last scritch, straightens up, and snaps his fingers.

They're still staring at each other, Dave gathering his words, figuring out where to even start, when the Captain barges back in, a paper bag in hand and a scowl on his face.

"Change of plans, gentlemen. Demon-assisted hold-up in progress at the Bank of America. It's a corporeal Class Three."


	7. Chapter 7

When the patrol car arrives at the scene Karkat is still licking frosting off his fingers. He radiates smug; getting two cupcakes when he was promised one was apparently enough to distract him from his hatred of cars.

Also enough to comfort his feeling that Dave is a chump. But that's par for the course.

They haven't talked and he thinks Karkat briefly looked as frustrated as he felt to be interrupted, but it doesn't matter right now. He'll do feelings later, for now there's a job to do.

Dave follows Jade out of the vehicle and they jog to the Detective in charge of the scene, heads bowed, Karkat bounding after them and freaking out a couple of officers guarding the perimeter. "No, he's not chasing us!" Dave throws over his shoulder, and goes to follow Jade, who's already crouching by the Detective.

"They're still inside the building," the woman is saying, "but we--"

Karkat hops on the patrol car's hood.

"Huh. What a poor bastard."

The Detective is staring, briefing interrupted. Dave sighs. "Get down off there, asshole, you're gonna get sniped."

He pulls out his service weapon and glances over the hood. His mundane colleagues have the street blocked, and presumably the building surrounded, but the bank sits on a little plaza and right in the middle is a green-glowing, mutated thing, coiled on itself.

He squints. "Huh, scaly."

"No kidding," the Detective says, a hint of frustration in her otherwise perfectly controlled tone.

"Lemme guess, it deflects bullets."

"Of _course_."

Jade and Dave nod in unison. "Of course."

The demon uncoils, giant snake tail whipping at the air, at nothing Dave can see. The upper body is kind of... monkeyish? Maybe even humanoid, urgh, creepy. The wings look more like stunted fins, or brand-new, not yet dried butterfly wings.

Also it has two heads. What the hell ever.

"Oh hey, it's a naga!" Jade exclaims, almost sounding pleased. Dave is not; the thing is almost fifteen feet long and over two thirds of that are the bullwhip tail. There's gouges in the pavement from its lashes, for fuck's sake.

"Okay -- Alders? Where's Lalonde and English? Dispatch said they were on the scene."

Detective Alders points at a car on the other side of the plaza. "English's still there, having demon difficulties. Lalonde, I don't know. Can you at least draw that thing away before they dig out a friggin' escape tunnel in there?"

The demon is still whipping its tail, scanning the plaza around itself with its faces turning independently and out of sync (creepy) and ignoring the police cars entirely. When it turns his way Dave can see its eyes are huge and faceted on otherwise humanoid faces. Creeeeepy. Its torso is fuzzy like the fluffiest merino sweater. No visible armor but with their luck the fur will be covered in contact poison. Worse, _airborne_ poison.

It's not paying any attention to his demon, who has obligingly slipped off the hood of the car and is now sitting wedged in the narrow gap between two bumpers, watching with curiosity and not one ounce of hostility as he licks his claws clean of sprinkles.

"Has the summoner gone crazy? What is it even _doing_?"

The demon flips itself around like it's trying to break its own spine and rakes its claws at empty air. Jade giggles in her hand.

"Naw," Dave says.

Jade pulls out a length of sheer, sea-colored gauze and a lighter from her jacket's inner pocket; the scarf catches and she lets the flames race up to her hand as long as she can before she drops the blackening, smoking mess on the pavement. Out on the plaza a blonde girl flickers into visibility long enough to plant a much-too-solid fist right in the demon's jaw.

"My guess is the idiot ordered it to target Roxy."

Roxy fades from view again. The tail lashes, too late -- at least Dave hopes, for a second afraid, but the impact would make her reappear, so she likely managed to dodge.

"Dave, remember what the boss said!" Jade exclaims sternly as she straightens up. Her coppery skin has gone snow-pale, moon-glowing. "Karkat--"

"Yeah, yeah, the asshole's too weak to fight, blah fucking blah."

Dave grumbles. Did they have to say it around the other cops? How is he meant to discreetly jump into the fray now? Bluh. He hates being stuck with the supervising.

Not that Karkat wasn't likely to sit on him to keep him safely back before that comment already. Can't let the life support battery get its stupid ass gobbled up, after all.

Jade blinks out, blinks back in all the way off behind the other barricade. Jake and Roxy are the ones with the steel and cold iron net in their trunk, and besides Jake isn't answering his cell so they don't know what the heck is the matter with his demons.

Dave eyes the trashing demon. It's starting to make an odd, vibrating, whining noise, like a thousand insects rising from a field together. The dude's getting frustrated, which can be good or bad.

Karkat doesn't look in any hurry to wade in. Not at all like yesterday. Dave eyes him suspiciously. "You chickening out, dude? Is it because it's a Class Three this time around?"

Karkat growls at him, all four eyes narrowing into slits. "Shut your moron mouth before you embarrass your whole work clique by association. I'm not scared of a _baby_."

Detective Alders breathes in through her nostrils and peers at Dave's demon over his shoulder. "Is it -- it's a baby demon? How can you tell?"

Karkat stares back blandly. "Open a vein and I'll tell you."

"Thought you didn't lie, buddy." Dave turns to the woman, rolling his eyes behind his shades. To her credit she hasn't budged. "He can't take blood from you, he's contracted to me."

Still staring at the other demon, Karkat huffs, stumpy tail shaken out as if to flick the drops of Dave's imbecility off. "I'm not _lying_ , I'm trying to get her to mind her own fucking business. It was hypothetical."

"Sure it was, Karkoala."

"Also I _could_ take offered blood from her, it just wouldn't oblige me to jack shit. Who's the liar now?"

"I wasn't lying, I was _summarizing_."

"Sure you were, douchenugget."

Dave sighs. Okay, now all the officers in earshot are stealing worried glances at them, and they all happen to have guns in hand. Awesome. "Okay, to clarify. He can drink from one of you guys, if you deliberately bleed yourselves for him _and_ you say it's okay. That's in his terms. He can't bite you or shove you in broken glass--"

Dave's cell phone rings, once. Dave bursts into position over the hood of the car and takes aim. "With me!" Bang, bang. The other officers shoot another volley. It's only an annoyance for the Class Three but it gets the thing to glance at them long enough to miss the net suddenly falling from the sky.

Roxy flickers back into the visible spectrum; her boots already end in hard, shiny hooves. She yanks on the rope; pavement cracks under her feet. The demon topples on its side with a screech, forced into a tight knot; only the last three feet of tail are out of the net.

Rose and Dirk are going to be _so happy_. With how long they've been wanting to capture one.

If Dave's honest with himself he's happy too. One thing they wanted to test out was how to disembody a demon without killing it. He -- if he ever has to let Karkat go...

He gets up to jump over the hood and go help Roxy.

Karkat trips him on his ass and tackles him back behind the cars, an armored hand closing on his collar to drag him behind the tire.

"What the _fuck_ do you think you're _doing_ , douchelord?!"

Dave is flat on his back on pavement. He has a demon straddling him, snarling in his face, red eyes open wide in outrage, pointy teeth showing an unnervingly far way down. He blinks. He tries to shove at his chest. "Karkat--"

It's not only outrage on Karkat's face, it's maybe also a touch of -- something that looks a lot like fear. "No, fuck you, stay the fuck down, they have guns in there!"

"Roxy and Jade need my help," Dave snaps back, and gathers Karkat's soul name to him to order him off. "They can cover me. Now--"

"Then _send me_ , dumbass."

Dave's gut reaction is an immediate no. Razor scales and leathery wings swoop down from nowhere and thwap his brain into shape before he can say it.

_Dude, you bound him for that shit. Now you're gonna let him sit on his sweet cheeks all pretty doll you ain't even playing with? That be brutal amountz of lamesauce._

... Fff.

"Like you wouldn't get shot as well," he grumps. "Does your shell even repel bullets? Shit, your head's not even shelled, or your guts, whose idea was that--"

Karkat rolls his eyes down at him. "Might surprise you but I've never been shot, so I have no idea."

"That is so reassuring. I am so reassured."

"Your packmates are out here fighting while you waste time. And I won't let you be stupid and go." Karkat looks up at Alders, who's staring with an expression Dave has no chance to read upside down. "Hey. You. You don't have to obey him. Sit on him."

Dave splutters a little bit.

_Haha, Crabzilla's pretty dope._

_Fuck you, 'tula, where were you even today? First I see you and it's for you to laugh at me?_

_Um, duh, firetruck. You needed mad privacy to sort this rapey shit out yourself. Woulda harshed worse if I'd been around for it._

Okay, yes, having that particular discussion with his boss with Latula eavesdropping would have been especially not good. Not that she doesn't know everything about it anyway. Fuck.

"Hey, asshole!" Karkat can't snap his fingers but he _can_ grind his claws against his palm. It sounds like nails on chalkboard. Gnnh. "Quick. Orders. Target. Class Three, human criminals? _Aim me, motherfucker_."

"No hostages, right?" Dave asks Alders, upside down. She shakes her head no. "Okay. Priority, the Class Three containment. Once it's secured--"

One of the other cars explodes.

Another ray of bright white light bars the sky over their heads as car pieces clatter down some dozen meters away from the brand new hole all through the body of the car, right between the front and back doors, it's a miracle none of the cops are worse than grazed by the shrapnel. Shit, no, some guy falling back, holding his shoulder, blood.

The second time it's a lamppost, support melted or eaten or some shit, the heavy lamp falling on top of an abandoned scooter. Crunch. Whoops. Dave scrambles out from under Karkat and into a crouch, gun gripped two-handed. A glance is enough to confirm that the Class Three is ... not as contained as it used to be. Welp.

It's shooting white beams from all four eyes. Fuck his life.

Okay. Succinct now.

"Karkat Vantas. Subdue this demon. If you can't protect your life or the cops' or passersby' life, kill it. Injuries to interfering summoner and criminal allies okay, lethal or long-term handicapping not okay. Go."

Karkat is gone over the roof of the car in the next second, leaping as suddenly as a startled rabbit. The car rocks as he kicks off it. Dave moves to the gap between the two bumpers, and tries not to think about that unprotected soft belly, that exposed face with its slightly upturned nose.

Karkat doesn't fly (not because of the stunted wings, lots of non-winged demons fly anyway somehow) but he moves so fast along the ground it hardly matters. The Class Three is still wriggling its way out of the net, hissing -- its scales are darkened, it leaks radioactive-looking green from a couple of cold iron burns. One of its heads sees him and it twitches around.

Its eyes are starting to glow. Dave tenses, trigger finger stiff with the need to shoot.

He wishes he could help, but he has nothing left to give, not unless ending up at the ER starts looking like the better option. Latula's helping him on credit; Aradia, much as she likes him, doesn't work like that. Damara... not even worth contemplating, she'd get him killed and laugh.

Karkat throws himself to the side to dodge; the other demon pivots on its tail, and then...

Doesn't fire.

Because Karkat is between it and the bank where its summoner is still stuck.

"Hey, asshole."

Okay, now why is he _talking_ to the demon.

"Can you speak yet?"

The other demon hisses and sways like a cobra before it slithers closer hesitantly. It starts to turn away, one of its heads scanning behind it for Roxy; Karkat growls.

"If you stop paying attention to me," he says, harsh, "I'm going after your summoner."

Okay, now the demon's attention is firmly on him. Huh. Wow. He basically checkmated the directive to look for Roxy with the stronger directive to preserve his summoner's life. Smart. Dave knew Karkat was wordy and quick to talk back, but this is a bit of a surprise.

It hisses and buzzes, swinging on its tail.

"Can you speak?"

"Nope," answer two discordant voices. They sound sullen more than actively hostile or suspicious. _Got the feelz it's not wild about being on this plane either, the poor dude_ , Latula comments. Dave kind of agrees _._

"If we fight, we're going to bring the building down on your summoner."

The green demon lashes its tail, but it goes nowhere near Karkat. Behind the two of them, Roxy is visible again; she tiptoes toward the remnants of the net, and makes not a noise. Fur flicks and coils nervously around her legs.

"Maybe," it says eventually. "Seems to me that's a matter of opinion."

"Do you want to take the risk?" The weirdest is how Karkat sounds honestly curious. Not hostile, not aggressive, not mocking.

"That's the dumbest question I was ever unlucky enough to hear -- what the fuck does it matter? I can't."

"Even though he's likely moving his fat ass way out of the line of fire already?"

... Dave's demon is smiling. He has a ton of teeth. Playful teeth.

 _Come on,_ they seem to say, _live a little. Let's blow up the building. Ruin the plaza. Squish a few humans! It'll be fun._

If he's trying to trick the other demon into attacking him so he can sidestep Dave's clean capture priorities Dave is going to let Rose at him.

The green demon grumbles. "Even then, you know the drill. You're such a shitty douchebag, wow. Asshole."

It's a bit surreal to listen to two demons having a sarcasm battle, if Dave wants to be honest with himself. Wow, but if there was one thing he did not expect from Mister Overkill it was a Let's Talk It Out option. Is Karkat trying to trick the other demon? There's a whole class between the two of them, it probably means a lot in terms of smarts and experience.

"Pff. Come on, there must be at least one whole brain in your two craniums, try to think outside the box a bit."

"Is your demon trying to subvert the other demon?" Alders asks sotto voce. Dave shrugs. "And if so, _for whose ends_?"

That's an awesome question. Dave would love an answer.

"Fuck the box!" the other demon growls, but then he sags dejectedly. "Fuck my life. It's all so pointless. Okay, fine, powers are too risky, let's just murder each other hand to hand, I don't even care."

Karkat sighs, and takes on a sympathetic expression Dave has never seen on him. "You idiot. You're all tail, you've got five times my reach. Like I'd go hand to hand against you."

His raised hand crackles with tongues of lashing red.

The other demon squints at it with its huge creepy eyes, and then sags again. "Aw, shit."

"Hey, maybe you'll laser me first!" Karkat answers with sardonic cheer. "With your... eyeball death rays. Maybe it won't even go right through me and straight into the utter moron who called a useless sack of whine like _you_ and then gave you the stupidest orders ever. I mean, that chick's not a danger anymore. Now what?"

"Not that the stalemate isn't nice and all," grunts one of the other cops, "but we can't actually get inside the bank so long as that thing isn't neutralized. Tell your demon to get a move on, okay?"

Yeah, Dave will get right on that, the second he figures out what kind of range that red attack has. What if Karkat's bluffing his ass off because it'd kill the cops too, and Dave ordered him not to?

The two-headed demon is swinging indecisively on its tail, glowering sullenly. "Bluh. Master fat-ass? If you're out of ideas could you just order me to kill myself or somethin', I'm so done with this massive bullshit."

A shadow shifts behind the window, too indistinct to shoot at. A frustrated man answers, "Just kill that demon already!"

The green demon goes entirely, dangerously still.

"Is that a prime directive. Master."

"Yeah, sure!" the man yells out, and behind him inside the bank two more voices yell back, muffled -- but Dave's pretty sure they were both yelling "NO!"

Karkat's eyes go wide and he throws himself to the side, rolls. A double ray of white light bars the air where he was, hits the bank's forefront; all the glass shatters. The green demon is pivoting already, shooting again, raking a long smoking gash across pavement; cops scatter away from the last car in the blockade, which shreds in two. _It's only a Class Three? Really?_ Dave has time to think, and then the ray hits a parked car _behind_ the police car.

Right in the gas tank.

The explosion deafens him, throws him down. He pushes himself back up on his smarting hands, ears ringing, scrambles to look for Karkat -- oh shit, oh fuck.

There's an officer on the plaza, amongst shrapnel and debris, blood smeared on the ground where she rolled before coming to a stop. She's been thrown clear over the back of the next patrol car and another ten feet ahead by the explosion.

"Officer down!" Dave yells, along with a couple others, but then a shot rings from the bank, ricochets off the pavement, forcing would-be rescuers to dodge low again. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

 _Aradia!_ he yells in his mind, yanking on his sense of Aradia's teasing spring breeze. _Where the fuck are you?! Aradia!_

After a few endless seconds of nothing, Aradia snorts, or gives a feeling so close it seems like she did. _Sorry to have to break it to you but you're not my only boyfriend, Dave!_

So someone else was summoning -- whatever; if she's answering at all then she's free to help him now. He pulls her closer in, only then out on the plaza red tendrils lash, like growing roots at a hundred times the speed. The green demon lets out a shrill wail as they stab through his tail, _erasing_ chunks of flesh right out of existence. Karkat dashes on all fours toward the fallen cop, grabs her arm -- glares right at Dave; " _Stay the fuck down!_ " he roars, and starts dragging the fallen officer toward the barricade.

A shot cracks; Karkat stumbles to the side. Dave yanks on Aradia. Such a wide area to freeze, but--

" _I will kill you myself!"_ Karkat is snarling at Dave, as he drags the limp woman hurriedly in the other direction, where the big blank wall offers a blind spot to the criminals inside.

He pauses there, breathes, and Dave breathes with him. He gets his cell phone. "Jade, the fuck are you doing?!"

Jake answers Jade's cell. " _So sorry, chap, they're strengthening the spell so it'll hold it next time, can't disturb them--"_

Of course they can't, interrupting a spell in the middle is a good way to have the power raised rebound in your face.

"What the fuck are _you_ doing, English?!"

Karkat is crouching there, before the unconscious officer, eyes gone to slits, as the green demon slowly coils its tail back under it. It's bleeding from several missing chunks, and the last meter of the whip tail drags on limply. Doesn't need its tail for eye lasers, though.

" _I let Roxy take Horuss on standby because I thought I had Eridan, only Eridan won't do a blasted thing! I don't get it, he loves sniping demons--_ "

"Okay, stay right where you are," the green demon is saying, "and then, like... Maybe if you can dodge at the _very last_ second, that'd be swell."

Because its prime directive is now to kill Karkat, which means protecting its master _isn't_ , which means it's about to--

"It's gonna bring down the building!" Dave yells. His last word is smothered in the thunderous crack of white rays cutting through stone.

Karkat dodges; a whole thorn bush of red tubes bursts into existence all around him, scores a dozen gashes down the green demon's front as it jumps out of range.

The first couple of raining tiles crack on impact with Karkat's attack, but don't disintegrate.

Aw, hell. The front of the building looms huge and full of shit to drop, Dave almost thinks it--

_It's falling._

He's over the car already, running for Karkat, for the officer. Later he'll think about it, calculate the arc it'd draw and the stretch of plaza it'd cover, calculating the weight -- three stories of cement and stone toppling over in deceptively slow motion.

He just --

( _they_ just)

Stop it.

One second and then two and it doesn't even hurt. (Of course it doesn't, why should it, it's in his/their power, it was always in them to do this.) The slab of façade looms at an angle over them, throwing shadows. They let dust and pebbles go, raining all around; could have stopped them too, not even a challenge, but, no, too expensive. Karkat is frozen, staring. Dave/Aradia's hands are up, like they're actually bracing the thing with their physical hands (physical things are neat!), as if meatside gestures can even do anything (no, no, symbols have power, Rose said. It helps. Channels. It has to.)

"Karkat!" Jade yells, and teleports in. She grabs the officer in a rough firearm's carry, blinks out. Karkat startles, snarls. Charges the green demon.

Out of range. Good. Dave/Aradia lets go.

And then Dave lets go of Aradia, too, and then the floor rises to meet his face.

A burst of wind puffs up in his face, blows his bangs back and dries his eyes, cushions his fall. He grunts as he lands. Stays face down there for a few seconds.

It doesn't hurt. It... he's just empty. He thought he was but now he really is. Totally empty.

 _What did you take?_ he finds the presence of mind to ask after a few seconds. (Two minutes, three seconds, seventeen microseconds, a hundred and nine -- no. Stop.)

_It's only a few years, Dave, don't worry. You've got a lot to spare!_

He thinks about it. Three years, five months. _Yeah, okay._

Someone races to him, leaps over debris, screeches to a stop. He turns his head.

"Strider! Oi, Strider!"

Oh, it's Jake. Cool. "Thanks for the windy thing, buddy," he says, muffled against the pavement. His eyes close. So tired.

Hands on him. Feeling down his spine. He scruffs his toes in the dust in vague annoyance, to show his back isn't broken.

"Yes, ah, John lent me -- when I think he could possibly have picked up that building himself, drat, I'm not any good with poor Tavros -- Strider, you need to stay awake!"

"I'm awake," he grunts, and makes Jake support him as he rolls on his back and sits up. "Just really don't wanna be."

The plaza looks like a war zone, covered in chunks of building; no matter how much he killed the momentum, the impact with the ground dispersed bricks and mortar and insulation and wires, and all the shit there was on and inside the wall.

The rest of the bank is still up, but Dave wouldn't give it good odds of staying up very long. The load-bearing walls in the middle are laser-scored too.

Jake pulls his arm over his shoulders and hauls him on his feet. Woo, merry-go-round. Latula's mind-hands press against his temples, stabilize the whirling all around him. Good, it's a bad time to be dizzy. (What he'd do without her some days, he's not sure.)

Jade is probably out of range, he gave the other cops enough time to run (he hopes, oh Lord he hopes); he looks for his demon, the green demon.

He doesn't find them until he's looking at the bank again.

They're inside the big waiting hall, half-hidden in shadows. The green demon is lashing and rearing like a rodeo cow. Karkat is perched on its shoulders, cricket feet planted on the roots of its wings, claws sunk several inches in.

As Jake gives into Dave's insistent tugging and jogs them closer, Dave gets to admire his demon's businesslike approach to grabbing a handful of hair in each clawed hand and slamming the demon's two heads together.

Thwock. Flop.

The green demon looks even longer stretched out unmoving on the tiles. Karkat hops off it and starts grooming, batting the dust off him like it's a personal offense. Heh. Heheh.

"Are you injured?" Dave calls out. His voice croaks out all weird; he coughs and tries again. Karkat looks up and him and scowls.

"I'm fucking _fine_ , you idiot -- _don't_."

It's... not Dave and Jake he's talking to.

A man comes out of the shadows, scruffy three-piece costume and stupid hat telling Dave who this is before he even sees the scar across that face.

He's holding a gun on them, of course.

Karkat slowly circles to place himself between Dave and Spades Slick, head low, wings spread.

"Seriously. Don't. You'll only have time to kill one of us."

"If he dies, you're freed," Slick says, voice scratchy with years of smoking. "What the fuck do you still care then."

Jake has his gun in hand, but it's the hand around Dave. Dave's gun ... he lost track of it, shit, are his superiors going to be pissed. Maybe if Jake drops him --

"I'll care long enough," Karkat promises, all quiet and serious and -- maybe a little sad. Dave can't even imagine what Karkat's expression looks like, right now, but the voice isn't one that belongs on a demon. "Please, I don't -- not you."

 _Whaaaat the fuck_ , thinks the small part of Dave's brain not concerned with the barrel aimed at his chest. The rest thinks that so far Karkat hasn't been too bad at negotiating. No bullet yet.

"He hasn't ordered me to capture you guys. Just the demon. Tell its summoner to release it from its contract, and we're square, sounds good?"

 _No, no it doesn't_ , Dave thinks, only if he opens his mouth Slick might shoot out of mere annoyance; he's been known to be impulsive like that. The man seems to be listening to Karkat, of all weird things.

Then Slick shrugs, says "Sure. Deuce?" and then Karkat sneaks the green demon a glance and nods, and the four criminals just file out of the shadows and down along the building, casual as you please. Dave can only admire the chutzpah. Jake is choking a little. He scrambles with his cell phone -- Dave pulls free of his hold so he won't hamper him -- and calls for backup, and starts racing after them.

Dave sits on a piece of masonry and watches Karkat, who's sitting straight on the ground and sagging all over -- shoulders, wings, head, even his spines seem wilted.

He's going to catch so much shit over not at least trying to get them to leave the money. He'd have tried usually, even with the gun on him; it's not every day he gives three years of his life, though. He's off his game.

Considering how hard it was to freeze the air to take even just his own body weight the other day, he's a bit surprised it was only three years.

"Karkat. You got shot. I remember that. Sure you're not hurt?"

Karkat pulls his head up and gives Dave a tired glare, and heaves himself to his hands and feet to pad closer.

"Here. You'll nag me until you've seen, so _here_."

He turns to show Dave his shoulder. The armor there has a weird dull line on it, like thin, hard plastic folded almost to the breaking point and then left to return to its normal position. Dave traces a light finger down the crease.

"Does it hurt?"

Karkat grumbles, but doesn't shift away from his touch. "Just a bit. I'll bruise. Won't show. On account of the shell and all, shit, my brain's all weird, what's wrong with me."

Dave stares at him, worrying until Latula chuckles. He lets her have his voice, trusting that sense of affectionate approval he can feel all through her. "Baby's first real adrenaline high, huh, crabzilla? Don't fret, it'll pass. Messes with you some when you come down, is all. That plus the power drain, wowza, it hardcore rulz that you're standing at all."

Karkat's face goes through a series of hilarious expressions. "What -- did you just -- _crabzilla_?"

Dave chuckles. "She sure did. Could be worse, don't complain or she'll change it for nubwings or something about your ass."

_Oooh hey, nubwingz!_

_Nope. Veto._

_Aw._

Roxy and Jade jog in, along with another three cops with shotguns -- things that could actually pierce a demon's armor at close range. Dave points at the green lump. "Karkat apparently negotiated for Deuce to let it go, so it's masterless...?" he glances at his demon to confirm; Karkat nods and drags himself back on his feet and goes back to the green demon, grimly determined. "--Hey, what?"

"What do you want to do with it, anyway?"

"Uh. Figure out how to send it back?" Jade says, blinking, as she helps Roxy set a silver rope all the way around the demon. "I mean, without unraveling its consciousness all over the place, that kinda sucks."

Dave pulls himself up on his feet somehow and wobbles after them.

"No fucking kidding it sucks, murder tends to. Hey, you whiny lump!" Karkat says, and pads close; he sneaks between Jade and Roxy, who pause.

"Karkat, we can't close the circle if you're in here!"

"Then don't. Give me a sec. Hey, whiny. I know you're awake."

"Fuck you, go away," the demon whimpers, not moving an inch, and making all three cops snap their guns up and aim at its long body.

Dave watches in bafflement as his demon comes to a stop by its shoulder and proceeds to pat its forehead where he knocked it out.

"Are you assholes going to throw in a healing?" he asks without looking back, almost absently. "Because it's kind of missing chunks and if it bleeds out you can't do your little experiments."

"Whose fault is that?" Jade replies, huffing. "Karkat, get out of the circle!"

Roxy shrugs. "Yeah, sure, of course we're going to heal it first, it'd be mean not to. Also I bet Dirk would think it'd probably throw off the results."

"Hm. Your word on it?"

Roxy and Jade exchange a look, and then a shrug. "My word on it," they both say together. Karkat relaxes a little, apparently satisfied. Dave continues to boggle. It's kind of interesting to see how Karkat gets involved, though. He didn't think demons really gave a shit about events that didn't affect them directly.

"Okay. You'll need a Page douchebag, so better call back that other guy." Roxy shrugs again and gets her cell phone. Karkat turns back to the other demon, pokes its shoulder. "Hey, loser. Whimper McDoucherson. What's your name? Make it easier on everyone."

"Don't wanna make it easier on everyone."

"But do you _fucking want to go home_."

The demon lifts one head off the floor, gauges Karkat's seriousness (very high) and the state of his patience (less and less high as the seconds go by) and mutters. "... Erisol."

Dave can't even parse the feelings he gets -- self-hate and apathy and ... what else? -- his brain won't kick into gear, but he knows Roxy and Jade have it, will be able to pass it along to Jake. It's fine.

Karkat's head is tilted at an angle, though.

"... Eri... sol."

"Mnh."

"And you're... oh holy shit you're _Doom_."

Dave is pretty sure the cops and the girls are boggling just as hard as he is when his demon suddenly sits down on his ass, throws his head back, and starts to laugh and _laugh_.

"Oh my fuck. Jesus shitting dick nipples. Eri _sol_!"

"Will you shut your blathertrap already," the demon mutters, going entirely unheard by Karkat who is laughing too hard to pay attention. Dave is still stuck trying to figure out how a demon name can be hilarious, and what Doom has got to do with it.

"Wow. Just, wow, you must be the sorriest excuse for a demon there ever existed. I'm almost sorry for you." Karkat pats Erisol's head, rough enough to make him yelp and pout, but oddly sincere about it. This is weird as shit, watching Karkat be physical -- be friendly -- with someone.

(Someone not him. Is Dave jealous of a trapped, injured, whiny demon? Dave is jealous of a trapped, injured, whiny demon.)

Jake is coming back at a jog, looking thwarted. Dave doesn't need anyone to tell him that the Midnight Crew escaped again. Jake feels the need to announce it, though, as he jumps over rubble and in the room. "They gave us the slip again! I can't _believe_ it."

"I can," Jade groans, and Karkat--

Karkat stares at Jake for a second and then booms out, "Eridan, you sad fucker!"

"Wow, fuck you too, Kar."

Jake seems as surprised as everyone else at what just came out of his mouth. Dave blinks. Considers. "Nah, bro, let them talk, could be instructive."

"Forward much?" Karkat is shooting back, and now he looks weirdly delighted, eyes glinting, body coiling like a cat about to pounce. "You've bred once and that was one time too many according to everyone sane in the whole universe."

"Eridan... bred," Dave mutters. "Eridan bred." _Hey girl, how likely is it that I got a brick to the head and I'm hallucinating this shit?_

Latula huffs at him. _Wow, don't harsh on my mad skillz, it ain't likely at all!_

Meanwhile Karkat looks mildly rapturous. "Oh yes. If I ever see Sollux again I am going to give him so much shit," he muses. " _So much shit_. Oh god, _everything is worth it_."

"Yeah, please do keep talkin' like I'm not even here," Erisol mutters. (wow, Erisol? As in Eri(dan)/Sol(lux)? Dave is impressed. Demon naming schemes are so original.) "Seriously, feel free, it's not like my existence wasn't a joke from the very fuckin' start, laugh away, I live to entertain..."

Karkat ruffles its hair. "Shush, whinelord. Wow, you just unseated them both, good job. That's a noteworthy accomplishment. Seriously, Eridan, what the fuck were you thinking, you asshole, he's just about the worst of both of you, combined in ways that make it _exponentially worse_."

Jake's expression is confused and weirded out and dubious as all hells, but the voice that comes out is nothing if not breezily confident. Maybe even a bit... purry?

"Yeah, shoulda gotten rage and bloody stubbornness to compliment my innate conqueror's heart. Nothing says we couldn't try again..."

Is Eridan... is he doing what Dave thinks he is doing.

From Karkat's expression, yes, he is.

Karkat finally ambles out of the rope circle, lets Jade close it behind him, takes a few steps toward Jake/Eridan and then stops to stare at them, mild and quizzical. "Wow, okay. I'm flattered. No, really. Let me put the extent of how flattered I am that way. Brooding a gutful of Equius' get in my flesh mammal-style actually sounds appealing compared to having offspring with you."

Thank _fuck_. Dave doesn't know how he'd react otherwise.

"But it's nice to talk to you, buddy, been a while, only now I think you've got to let your ride bind your brat." Karkat tilts his head, eyes the body in front of him in a reserved, weighing way that tells Dave he's looking at Jake somehow, not at the demon inside him. "... Well, maybe we'll get to chat again later."

"Oh, sure thing," Jake replies thoughtlessly. Karkat brightens up a little, enough to crack a crooked little smile.

"Okay, cool. Go do your job now, you slacker. Good job getting distracted from procedure by random blather, guys, by the way, awesome cops you make."

He pads back toward Dave, smug all over, and sits beside him to groom. Dave considers him for a few seconds, and then he hooks him by a horn and drags him in range to smush his cheeks, since noogies would backfire spectacularly.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning, if you have a secondhand embarrassment squick, some of this might ping you some.
> 
> also the links in this are not real links, in case your browser decides to treat them as such don't bother clicking.

The first coherent thought Dave has upon waking up is _fuck yeah three days' leave_ , so he goes straight back to sleep.

The second coherent thought he has, about a hour later, is _shit want to pee don't want to brave the ladder dilemma_.

The third is _old soda bottle in the corner?_ And the fourth is _Rose will know somehow, I'll never live it down_.

At any rate, he is awake. He cracks open his eyes, gazes at the slanted ceiling, stretches his legs. Shit yeah futon. Missed you, buddy. His back hardly hurts today.

Of course he kind of hurts everywhere else. But it's a low-grade, stealthy kind of soreness. He figures so long as he doesn't move an inch it'll have no reason to get worse. Maybe he can get Karkat to fetch stuff for him.

Something is breathing nearby.

Dave cranes his neck, rolls his head on the nice soft fluffy pillow. On his left, the railing, the high ceiling of the rest of his apartment. The upper curve of a tall window. Toward his feet: the ladder, and another window.

On his right...

The wall. Okay, fascinating. Only when he looks up in the corner where the ceiling slants low, behind the futon, there's his demon, curled in a tight ball in a nest of old clothes and stolen pillows, sleeping.

It's the first time Dave has seen him like this. Unaware. Vulnerable. Not glaring suspiciously or pretending to ignore him but tracking him anyway.

And he stayed close.

Heh. Probably because his nest is here, and he didn't want Dave's insistence on sleeping in his own bed to chase him off, the stubborn little brat.

Dave's best camera is downstairs, but cameras are a reliable and always appreciated birthday present and he's got like seven of them, and it just so happens his third best is right there by the side of his bed. Dave turns onto his side, doesn't even bother to lift his head off the pillow.

Click.

Oh hey, there's the cable to plug it straight into his phone. Look at that. He knew one day it would pay to be a lazy fuckhead and leave it all in a tangled mess by the head of his bed.

Takes him two minutes.

**#fuckyeahpetdemon demon hunting technique step one look adorable to lure fools in http://flickr.com/photo...**

He's an asshole, so he wiggles closer to the corner of the bed and flicks Karkat's forehead right between his smaller eyes.

Click, click.

" _What the fuck?!_ " says the sudden pointy bits explosion.

Dave thumbs through his pictures. Haha, okay, yeah, this one. He uploads it.

"No, seriously, what's your malfunction, I was _sleeping_! Did you _want_ me to savage you?!"

**#fuckyeahpetdemon demon hunting technique step two bite chunk off dinner http://flickr.com/photo...**

"Hey, I'm talking to you. Stop poking away at your phone thing. Hey, dickwad -- oh, what the fuck ever."

Click.

**#fuckyeahpetdemon step three groom prissily aww yeah still the prettiest http://flickr.com/photo...**

"... Did you just take pictures."

Karkat is suddenly looming over him, hands planted on the corner of his mattress as he squints at the phone screen. Dave blinks mildly.

"Shh, babe, I'm making you a star."

Karkat stares down at him for a few seconds. "Right. Give me that thing, I obviously need to call someone in to treat your brain damage."

Dave chuckles, quiet and rough, lets his eyes close again. He is _so tired_. It's a _still alive! booyah_ kind of tired though, so he doesn't mind too much. He wriggles a little in his bed, makes himself comfortable.

"If you think I'm letting you sleep after you just woke me up, I really am going to have to call someone about your brain damage."

Dave purses his lips in aunt-like disapproval. "Aw, come on. It's so nice in here. I'll even let you share if you wanna."

Oh hey cuddling. Yes. This is what's missing to make it the perfect morning. Be so damn nice to have someone to drape his arm on and hair to play with and everything.

He doubts Karkat is going to want to, though. Unless Dave orders him, and yeah, nope. Okay, bummed now. He sighs.

"You need anything?" he asks, because he can be a responsible summoner, yes, really, he can.

Yesterday Detective Alders and the partner of that officer who was thrown out on the plaza that Karkat went to drag to safety both opened a vein for him, so he shouldn't be ravenous. It's probably the best time to discuss some shit.

He wishes he could at least have breakfast first. If he starts pushing it off, though, he'll keep delaying until it's time to go back to work. (Until it's time to feed him again.)

Karkat stares at him in silence, eyelids hooded thoughtfully.

"I could eat."

Shit. Dave rubs a hand across his face. "Physical or metaphysical food?"

"Both."

Shit. "Well. Let's go to the kitchen first." He struggles into a sitting position; all his muscles suddenly point out how sore he is. Holy shit, full-body ouch.

Karkat's brow furrows, and he looks away. When Dave looks at him, leaning forward, hands pressed to the futon, the demon looks -- unsure. Worried.

"Karkat?"

"My -- something inside feels weird. Not very good."

Dave's back stiffens. He touches Karkat's shoulder, eyebrows furrowed. "Show me where. How bad is it?"

Karkat grumbles, but sits up straighter, rests a hand on his belly. "Not very, but worse than yesterday."

" _Yesterday_?"

Karkat scowls at him, lips pursed, and looks away. "I thought I was imagining it at first. I wasn't hit there, so I have no clue what the fuck. It's not hunger, I remember that from earlier -- hell, I'm feeling it now."

"Yeah, and your stomach would be higher -- if you're made like a human inside." Dave is realizing that he has no idea. Shit.

Okay, no panicking, he's been feeling it a while, there's still time. Dave drags himself out of his warm nest of blankets, grabs his cell phone, and crawls to the ladder. (Karkat dragged him up yesterday, since Dave couldn't pull up his own weight but was damn well determined to go. He bounced him off every single rung. What if it's something really bad, what if something ruptured, how do you even operate on a demon.)

He hunts up some fresh underwear (anyone else, he doesn't give a fuck, but it makes him feel too weird to call Jane Crocker when his butt is naked and his man parts dangling merrily) and dials. "Jane? Hey babe, listen, I know you're busy but--"

" _Are you bleeding from the eyeballs?_ "

"No but--"

" _Are you bleeding from lower orifices?_ "

Dave rakes a hand through his hair, gives a tug. "No -- Jane, it's not for me!"

" _Because I really don't have time today to -- oh. What's wrong?_ "

Bleh. Nice to see how he rates. He looks up at Karkat, who's perched at the top of the ladder and watching him. he looks more tense and unhappy than irritated for once. Dave doesn't like it. "He says he didn't get hit there but his tummy hurts -- don't laugh, okay, I'm serious, like, inside, lower than where his bellybutton should be, but I have no idea if all his guts and stuff are even in the same place and--"

" _Yes, they are. Dave? Can you turn up the sound? I need to ask Karkat a question._ "

He does.

She asks.

Karkat goes "Oh."

\--

**#fuckyeahpetdemon how can so much turd come out of such a scrawny dude idgi**

\--

"Shut up."

Dave arches his eyebrows and chews noisily on his strawberry jam toast.

"I'm serious, shut up."

"Mnn-hmm."

"And hand me the jam."

"Mmh."

"And fuck you. By the way."

"Mnh." Gulp. "Did you wash your hands, dude."

"Fuck you and yes and shut up."

Dave doesn't say anything. Very pointedly. Karkat drags a chair closer to the kitchen table and perches in it, glaring daggers at him. If he could blush no doubt he'd be scarlet. Fucking adorable.

Also hilarious. Dave has laughed himself out while Karkat was in the bathroom, though, so now he can pretend total indifference-- "Pff."

"Shut the fucking fuck up."

Okay no he can't.

Dave hands over his spare toast before Karkat can try fishing the jam out with his claws, or worse, licking it straight from the pot. He busies himself making some more and doesn't betray how many awws are pushing behind his teeth about the way Karkat licks the toast clean, and _then_ eats it. It's so precious he might die early from an acute case of diabetes.

Bad plan if he did, he's gonna die earlier already as it is... Okay, no thinking about that. Aradia gave him a real bargain, end of story.

"Flesh things are so ridiculous I can't even fathom how the first amoeba didn't just go 'the fuck am I doing' and explode through its cell walls in utter shame."

"Maybe it did. Unicellular division is pretty much how amoebas reproduce, innit? Whoops, all those amoeba bits are now baby amoebas. Go forth and be fruitful, my self-hating children. By the way, was that dude really Eridan and Sollux' lovechild?"

Karkat grumbles under his breath. "More like hatechild, I think. Don't remind me, the poor thing, it makes me want to puke."

"And it's a... Page of Doom? Huh. Neither of them is a page."

Karkat shrugs. "Doesn't work like that with classes. Aspect, yeah, unless they invert, but class is more personality based, and that poor asshole has 'lots of potential, none of it showing up!' written all over it. Might evolve when it crosses over to Class Four, if it lives that long."

Dave makes interested noises, though he's more interested in having a conversation, any conversation, than in stuff Rose will probably tell him was already known.

He's trying to delay having another conversation, he knows. Mnh.

He drinks one, two, three long mouthfuls of coffee. Ow, hot.

"You think that's why God made amoebas hate themselves, so they'll actually want to self-destruct and seed their baby germs or whatever? Because that exploding shit has got to hurt."

"Say, how many tragic head-first accidents have you had with the ladder, total?" Karkat asks. "You can round it up."

"But you peed before today, right? So how come number two was such a -- okay, no, we don't throw toast, that is a grievous waste of jam."

Karkat hisses between clenched teeth and nabs Dave's coffee cup, swallows it while glaring nastily at Dave before Dave can warn him.

"That is not going to help your transit issues, bud. How's it taste?"

"... Fuck you. How can you drink that stuff, it's hideous." He drains the cup anyway.

"I can't wait to see you bouncing off the walls this afternoon," Dave comments. Alas, the pot is empty. Eh, whatever, he doesn't have to go out today, he can take a nap if the need takes him.

Karkat is about to push off the table and get up; Dave calls him back, sobering up.

"Karkat. Wait. We've got to talk about some shit."

Karkat sits back, slow and cautious, scanning his face for meaning and apparently not finding much of it, from his frown.

Dave opens his mouth, closes it. "Wow, I have zero idea where to start. Uh."

"What is it about?"

Dave scratches at a dried spot of mystery food on the table. His face is getting a bit hot. Hell. "Feeding. Uh. The sex one."

Karkat's eyes narrow dangerously. "If anything you're going to say ends in _'and this is why I can't feed you this way'_ you can cram it back in your gullet and choke on it."

Dave sighs. "I know it's not feasible to cut it out. I just--"

Karkat cuts him off with a short, irritated teakettle whistle. "Is it about your weird hang up about my finding fleshy stuff weird and gross? Shitting was weird and gross too, and I did it anyway. I don't get your problem!"

Dave stares at him, at a loss, and Karkat's irritating is irritating _him_ now, and _argh_. "Look up consent! Look up _rape_."

Karkat's fists are planted on the table, and usually he never stands like that but maybe it helps his hip joints that he's leaning forward because he's definitely standing on his back legs right now. It makes him so much less of Dave's half-cat talking pet and so much more of his human prisoner.

(His slave, now, might as well call a cat a cat.)

"You have my name," Karkat says, slow and forcefully patient. "I gave you my _fucking name_. How am I supposed to consent _more_?"

Dave flings a hand up, lets it flop down. "You were tricked!" He can't even hold his eyes for more than a handful of seconds. Shit. Fuck.

But Karkat doesn't snarl back, surprisingly enough, just tilts his head slowly, like looking at Dave from another angle will, he hopes, suddenly make him make sense.

"... Are you seriously feeling _guilty_ that I was stupid enough to get myself caught?"

Dave glares up at him, cheeks hot. Why is Karkat making him feel _stupid_ for it, fuck's sake.

"Wow. You are. Okay, what the fuck." Karkat slowly sinks back down into his chair, though he's still staring at Dave like maybe if he does it long enough his stare will level up into an X-ray that also reads thoughts somehow. "Okay, I think I can conceive of ... wanting a fair fight, it's not good if it's too easy...?"

Gnmrph. _Demons_. So if he beat Karkat fairly it wouldn't be rape? To the victor go the spoils as an actual moral thing? No, Dave refuses to accept this, he can't, he... has no idea how to explain anything else. The philosophical divide is so vast, he doesn't know how to bridge it.

"Let's... yeah okay why the hell not, let's go with this notion. To start from. It wasn't fair, so..."

"Huh." Karkat hums, thoughtful, scratches at the underside of his chin. "You don't feel that you deserve my name?"

"Uh. That is. Definitely not a thing I am feeling. Seriously, just -- _rape_?"

Karkat blinks, upper eyes first and then the bigger pair, like a wave of _what_ running from the top down.

"Out of all the fleshy stuff that has to happen to me now -- there's things that move and _gurgle inside me_ , my moods change from stupid external factors like not enough _sleep_ and not enough _food_ and _too tired_ \-- do you get that? My mood, my _self_ , is affected by outside factors, by -- random biological processes? You think I _care_ about having to lay down here for five minutes as you do your weird touching thing?!"

He started out slow and lecturing. He finishes snarling and up on his feet once again, claws twitching with the need to dig furrows in the wood, only Dave ordered him not to damage his shit so he can't even do that.

 _'Your weird touching thing.'_ Wow.

"And now I'm angry and all my spines are up, and did I tell them to?! No I fucking didn't! I can't control jack shit in this body, how do I fucking control that?!"

"By... calming... your... tits..." Dave drawls out, though he regrets being flippant the next second. He sighs, winces. "Seriously, just -- hey, lemme show you a biological trick. Sit down? Okay, thanks. Now breathe air in, and hold it there."

Karkat looks suspicious, but he does, chest puffed up, armor plates showing flashes of red in the cracks. Dave only halfway believes this is happening. He feels like a kindergarten teacher, a bit.

"One, two, three. Release slowly as you can. Okay, good, do it again."

Karkat does it a third time without prompting, and then a fourth. His hair already looks less bristly; his frowns smoothes a little. Dave tucks his thumb in his palm rather than leaning in and smoothing it out the rest of the way.

"Feeling better?"

"Some," Karkat says grudgingly. "I'm still not happy."

Dave gives a slow not, crosses his arms loosely on the table before him, leans on his elbows a bit. "It doesn't control your emotions, buddy, only keeps you from having your body and your brain wind each other up until you end up in the clouds and the only response is to rain down fire and brimstone upon the Earth."

Karkat grumbles, chin propped up in his palm, elbow spur planted on the table, "You say that like I wouldn't want to do it anyway."

Startled, Dave laughs, just a quick one. He purses his mouth to keep from smiling too much, shit's uncool, but... Okay, no, Karkat can have this one. Heh. "You're such a _brat_."

"You're such a tool." A sigh. He stares down at the table, eyelashes shadowing his eyes, a fang peeking out as he gnaws thoughtfully at black lips. Dave really, really wants to kiss him.

Karkat twitches, stares at him with suspicion; Dave remembers he can feel his, ah, _interest_. Um. It wasn't like he was massively perving!

"Okay. I don't get your problem, but yeah, okay, you have a problem. Just -- don't take away giving me your energy?"

Shit, now he sounds hesitant, this is wrong, this is bad, Dave really dislikes it.

"Because -- because _that_ I get. _That_ feels normal -- almost normal, it's good, it makes me stronger, it -- it's pure energy, even if it has a weird -- taste, shade, undertow, argh, you don't have the right words, why is there no word for this?"

"Blame Kankri for not making one up yet?"

"... Yeah, I can do that."

They stare at each other in silence for a few seconds.

"I can do that, too," Dave says quietly. "Keep feeding you that way, I mean." That's the problem, actually. "It's just --"

Karkat climbs on the table. Um.

Karkat shuffles to Dave's side of the table. Um.

Karkat headbutts him in the forehead. Ow.

And then he swings his long armored legs around to bracket Dave's chest and he hops off the table's edge and slips in the gap between Dave's body and the table.

Um.

There isn't much of a gap, actually; gravity has to help fight the friction.

Holy fuck is there friction.

Ngh. Nghghhgh. Dave has an armored hellspawn straddling his lap, pinning him, trapping his hips between muscled thighs, Dave has a hard plastron pressed tight to his own chest, there's barely enough space to breathe.

They're breathing each other's air.

"Karkat--"

The demon rests his forearms on Dave's shoulders, digs his elbows in some. He leans in, nips his chin. He does it a bit hard, Dave bets his skin has pointy little indents now. He's hard as a rock.

His hands cup narrow hips of their own accord, feel their way across smooth chitin, to the small of Karkat's back. "Shit. Do you even -- do you feel it at all?"

"Huh? Yeah."

He sounds distracted, like Dave's question is an interruption without too much of a relationship with the shit he's thinking about. Cools Dave down some. He bows his neck, presses his forehead against Karkat's cheek, eyes closed.

"Have you ever...?"

"Will you finish a sentence already, you're pissing me off." He squeezes his legs on Dave's hips experimentally. Dave grunts, immediate reaction.

"Ff... You're not making it easy, okay? I was just thinking -- if -- I feel selfish as fuck just using you like this. Would it -- argh!"

Oh, fuck, Karkat nipped his _neck_.

The asshole doesn't even bother asking him if it was a bad argh, because apparently he can feel it wasn't. He's just giving him a narrow, smug smirk. Making a displeased noise under his breath, Dave nips his chin right back. Karkat regards him like that attempt at hurting him was pitiful and beneath his notice, but that wasn't even a, no, shit, he needs to _think_.

"Would you want me to try -- to make you feel good, too? Can I -- can I try that? Please? I'm not, I won't order you to let me do that, you don't even want the sex at all so if you'd rather lie there and think of England that's fine, your choice, England's a pretty nice country or so I'm told if you like rain and soccer and--"

Karkat wriggles, presses closer. Dave was not aware there was a closer to be had. His dick rubs nice and almost too tight against Karkat's taut belly. No, shit, it rubs farther down, against the curve of his crotch, like a woman's pubic mound almost only without the valley in the middle. Dave wants out of his underwear. No, he doesn't. Yes? No? It's not like a single layer of cotton is an efficient barrier anyway _oh Lord_.

Karkat doesn't even rub up and down, just presses harder and shifts back and presses back in, it's weird as fuck, it's marvelous. Dave's hips start rolling on their own or almost; his hands are curving down along the last segments of Karkat's vertebral column plates, finding soft velvet curves.

"I can hurry up too, one minute man, you won't have to ah hell you need to stop doing that _I'm going to come in my boxers_ , Karkat -- Karkat--"

His fingertips tease the edge of his little tail and it twitches under his touch, flicks like a lamb's, it's hilarious, adorable, he wants to tease the underside, he wants to do a hundred things he's not going to get the time to, because isn't it embarrassing how much of a teenager he feels like around Karkat, how fast his pleasure crests. Karkat nibbles at his neck, his shoulder, finds the still healing wound his own fangs have left, and Dave is done.

He grabs Karkat's ass and hauls him in, and he--

\--and a key turns in the front door lock.

 _Holy shitting monkeyfuck_.

He rears back in panic, catches a glimpse through the kitchen door of the front door opening, a slice of silhouette -- oh shit, oh fuck, _Rose_ \-- he doesn't think, gets up still holding Karkat to him, shoves him forward to get out of sight before she sees them.

The table scrapes loudly against the floor as their combined weights shove it ahead, glasses and cups rattle. His body is stupid, his coordination is shot, Karkat's thighs -- Karkat's thighs won't let go and his claws dig into Dave's back thoughtlessly, startled, and Dave comes, racked with shudders, his mortified face hidden against his demon's neck.

Jesusfuck on a motorcycle.

" _Dave! Are you_ \-- oh. Huh."

"Auuuuugh!" he yells into Karkat's shoulder. His hands are still on his demon's ass, aren't they? Yes. They are. Fuck his life. Fuck it with a _chainsaw_. "Get out! Get out, get out, _get out!_ "

"I thought you fell," his sister replies, pinched. And then he expects her to _apologize_ and say she'll come back later, and instead she says, frostily, "We'll be waiting in the living room."

 _We_.

We?

We.

 _Aaaaauuugh_.

"What, no? Just leave!"

"No can do, bro," Dirk (No. Why Dirk. Why.) yells from the other room. "My condolences for the coitus demolitus, but seriously, hurry the fuck up."

Can he escape through the window. Yes. this sounds like a plan. Dave waits for the sound of heels to go out of range before he forces himself to lift his head. Shit, he's crimson from forehead to throat, and he doesn't want to think about his ears, they feel like burning.

Karkat is sprawled on his back on the kitchen table, thighs spread, wings splayed open amidst butter sticks and jam jars; he blinks up at him in utter confusion.

Dave can't even think of anything to say. He just stares back. Just... fuck. Argh. Augh. Nrgh.

Karkat presses a foot against Dave's hip and push-rolls himself back on his wings and shoulders, and then he twists at the hips so he rolls back down on the side, freed from Dave's body, and he jumps off the table.

"Did those assholes just sour my meal on me. Is that what happened." He shakes his head in disbelief, stalks his way to the door. He looks like murder all over. Dave is frozen in place a second too long and then Karkat is in the other room and Dave gives chase, at least to the doorway.

"I was eating, you heinous bitch!"

"Yes, I saw that," Rose replies primly. Dave would die inside some more if he couldn't see a trace of blush on her face. Thank fuck he's not the only one bothered.

"Hey, dickwad? Which one does the key belong to? Because the other one would be a trespasser, and I can eat their fucking face."

Dave rubs his face with a hand. Shit, he's not even wearing his shades yet. They're all the way back by his bed. Neverfuckingmind. "They both have keys. Sorry, no dice."

At least Karkat... doesn't seem happy to be interrupted? So on some level he must have, okay, 'enjoyed it' was a way tall order, but not minded the acts much, compared to the expected end result.

Rose is seated in a corner of the couch, and Dirk perches on a square Ikea thing with shelves in it that Dave uses for storing vinyls he doesn't mind scratching and putting his keys and cell phone and shit on top of. He doesn't even know what that type of furniture is called.

Dirk is generous, fishes jeans out of the clean clothes hamper and lobs them at him, over Karkat's shoulder. Karkat twitches, wings flicking open in threat. Dave's just glad to have something to hold against his crotch. He trudges to the bathroom, slams the door behind him, sees about cleaning up some and puts his pants on.

It's not like his siblings haven't seen his bare chest before, so he just trudges out, slouching, hands in pockets and glowering their way.

Rose is tapping her nails against the coffee table, click-click-click, and it isn't Kankri who pains her irises with wet red, it's Terezi's flat burnt-out eyeballs.

Why the _fuck_ does she feel the need to call on the Seer of Mind at him.

"Sit down, bro," Dirk says in a vague, _is this actually an order_ way. (From experience? It is.) Dave bristles.

"Thanks for inviting me to sit in my own place, dude." But he goes anyway, dragging his feet to the far end of the couch and flopping there, sullen and irritated. Are they angry at him? What the hell for?

"No problem," Dirk replies, and crosses his arms. Reminds Dave way too much of Bro like this.

When Karkat hops onto the coffee table between Dave and his guests and crouches there to glare at them, Dave has to admit he's a little glad of the support. He reaches to slide his hand down a flared wing, smooth it back down. "Hey, Karkat. It's okay."

"What the fuck do they even want."

Dirk just slants Karkat a look before going back to Dave, Rose doesn't even bother. "How old, now?" she asks, bitten out neat and precise, coldly furious.

"Uh?"

"How old are you going to live to be? Thirty-five? _Forty?_ "

Oh. Huh.

"What did you even fucking give to stop a whole _building_ \--"

"It was just the façade," Dave says, which is obviously the wrong answer, because then Rose's hands curl into actual claws and hard white scales start to shimmer over her skin. "Sixty-six!" he hurries to add. "I'm just down to sixty-six. Year old, not years lost. Sixty-six and, idek, six days and six hours and etcetera. She only took a bit over three years."

They both stare at him. Karkat's little tail flicks in irritation as he slowly adopts the sphinx pose, glowering at them.

"You're... not lying," Rose eventually says, like she doesn't believe her own words, her own demon. Dirk makes a sharp sound of disagreement.

"Except it's not fucking possible, lil' sis, you saw the mass of that whole thing, they say he held it for over _ten seconds_ , every point of data we have collected about that Maid of Time is that _she does not work that way_. Her requests are regular, predictable and _it's not fucking possible_."

Dave's brow knits. "That... huh. Seriously, she ought to have asked that much?"

"Seriously, _yes_. Maybe forty-five if some of that concrete was actually wood or plastic, might I remind you that it would mean you'd now be at the _halfway point_ of your _life_?"

Dave stares at his twin, and then sighs and reaches across the couch to pat her knee. "But I'm not, it's fine. Want me to ask my girls?"

Latula responds fast; Aradia must be busy elsewhere.

_Yeah? Whassup -- oh. Um._

_Yeah. Oh um._

Dave and Latula share a discomfit moment, and then she goes, _hey, can I...?_

_Bluh. Sure, why not._

_Woo._ "Hey, kiddo! How'z it hangin'!"

Rose looks conflicted for a second, but then with a sigh she lets go, and Terezi smiles her huge, bright crocodile smile from Rose's understated face. "Hello, Latula! Sadly I don't think we can chat much today, Rose and I are in agreement that this affair needs explored from top to bottom!"

"Aw, harsh but I hear ya. Aiight, aiight." She moves their hand in an expansive flick. Karkat is staring at them, looking displeased.

"Can you personally attest that Dave isn't down a third of his lifespan?"

"Sure can."

Dave has to admit he wasn't doubting Aradia before Rose and Dirk brought it up but it's still really nice to have confirmation.

Only there's something Latula isn't saying yet, so he pokes. _You holding out on me, grrrl?_

She sighs, long and loud, and then she points straight at Karkat, with both pointer fingers at once.

Dave blinks their eyes. Rose/Terezi blinks. Dirk arches an eyebrow.

Karkat... grumbles. And starts fussing at his left hand with the right, which is apparently suddenly fascinating.

"Karkat?" Dave asks.

"Goddamnit."

"I'm baffled," Dirk admits blandly. "What about Karkat?"

He doesn't answer on his own, so -- Dave makes him. He doesn't like to, but it feels -- he thinks it's important, Latula thinks it's important, and Terezi has gone still like a hound scenting prey. "Karkat Vantas. Answer. What do you have to do with Aradia riding me yesterday?"

Karkat hisses at him, spines flicking up in irritation. "You stole the difference right out of me, you asshole, is what I have to do with it."

Dave stops breathing.

"Did I -- oh. Did I take your years?"

"Not my years, dickmunch, demons are pretty much immortal unless killed, what the fuck would it be worth to her? Thirty years off infinity is still infinity. No, you took it in power. Which is why I'd like it if your brood clones could get the fuck out so we could go back to feeding me!"

Dave groans, presses a hand over his eyes. Rose is trying to repress a smile. Someone kill him.

"... Jesus Christ, how powerful are you?" Dirk asks, and oh, yeah, Dave hadn't gotten there yet. Huh. Yeah.

"When someone drains me of the shit I was _using_ , thank you very much?" Karkat glares at Dave, eyes briefly throwing a weak sunset glow on his cheekbones, his nose, even in the light of the living room. "I had to finish it by _hand_ , you lazy asswipe, when are you going to _fill my fucking tank._ "

"Hubba hubba," Dirk says, expressionless. Dave pegs him in the head with yesterday's dirty shirt.

"Is that a Blood attribute?" Rose asks, bright-eyed and curious, as Dirk drops the shirt in the middle of the floor. "I mean, the ability to give your energy to your master?"

"I didn't _give_ jack shit," Karkat grumbles, but he avoids her eyes and then Rose lets out a Terezi laugh.

"Lie!"

"Not a lie!" Dave and Rose turn their best Mind dubious moues on him. He gives. "...Okay, I chose to give it, but it was that or allowing my summoner to get himself damaged, and I'm forbidden to do that, I'm not calling it a choice."

"You might have chosen to interpret the shortening of Dave's lifespan as not damaging, since death is unavoidable for a human and it wouldn't have hurt him any for the remaining time he had."

"... Fuck, that's right." Karkat squirms a little; he looks embarrassed by his lapse, it's oddly hilarious. "No, wait, it'd have caused mental anguish, that counts, right?"

"Dude. Think back to a half-hour ago."

"... Shut up. You know what? Just shut up."

Okay, yeah, Dave is totally fluffing up his hair. Yes, he is. He just makes sure to be careful as he slips his fingers in to the root, to avoid the quills, and then he ruffles and scritches Karkat's already messy hair into a dandelion.

Rose chuckles to herself and then says, "Kankri would like us to know how petty and cruel it is to give a Knight of Blood an order to ensure an individual does not come to harm, and then mock them for interpreting it as 'protect at all costs.' Now that does open up some interesting avenues for speculation...!"

Karkat was sort of craning his neck under Dave's hand, grimacing like he couldn't figure out if he wanted more or if he wanted to bite, but when Rose finishes he just groans and lets his head fall face-down on the coffee table. "Kankri. Kankri, fuck you. Fuck a hole right through your sanctimonious brain and into your blatherglands, can you never keep your communication nodules under check, shut the fucking fuck up about me using fuck you as an insult yes it's a metaphorical fuck now shut up, shut up forevermore--"

Dave pets his hair again, though he's biting down on his chuckles. "There, there. You realize the more you whine about it and the more Rose knows it's important, right?"

Karkat growls against the table, wings gone limp and sliding off the edges. "Fuck you too. In nonsexual insulting ways, not in actually productive ways, if you couldn't guess."

"By the way," Dirk asks, "Can you actually hear Kankri speak, or are you just guessing? Because I've got Eridan whining at me about how he wants to chat it up come on pretty please I won't even hit on him much, and you haven't reacted even once."

Karkat just groans and oozes himself even flatter somehow.

"So... You hear Kankri. When he's riding me, or at any time?" A groan. Rose smiles. "I think probably only when he's using my body as an interface, or Dave would have caught you two debating before." Another groan. "Hm. Yes. Is it merely because you're both Blood? Or could, say, Eridan speak with Erisol, even though they're Hope and Doom?"

Dirk purses his lips a bit, arches an eyebrow pointedly. "Welp, Eridan just fucked off for parts unknown. Interesting."

Karkat lets out a short, frustrated yell. "Can you guys just _leave_ already?! I'd eat your _guts_ if I could I am so fucking hungry!" He pushes out from under Dave's hand and scrambles up the ladder, hissing. "Go away! You know he's safe now, just fuck off!"

He angrily throws pillows over the railing, by the corners so they spin like very fluffy shuriken before hitting. Dave purses his lips. "Okay, guys, it's not gonna damage the futon to be thrown overboard, so you can bet your asses it's the next item on the list. I really don't want to have to drag it back up. Subtle hint?"

Thank god, Dirk gets up, nods. "Yeah, okay. We'll leave you guys to your sexathon. Remember to drink a lot of energy drinks."

"... You just managed to kill my dick for the next three hundred years. Thanks, bro."

He herds them back to the door. Before she goes Rose turns and hugs him around the neck so tight he'd almost worry about bruises. He hugs back, eyes closed.

"Sorry, sis."

"You're the only twin I've got -- as per the definition," she says in his neck, very quietly. "Please avoid -- don't be an idiot, okay?"

Dave knows Rose's not the kind to meekly accept his idiocy. She'd be tempted to do some drastic shit to fix it for him. Bad plan all around. He tightens his hug and kisses her cheek, and frees her.

Of course Dirk is watching, unreadable, so Dave just puts on a flippant tone and goes, "Yo, big boy, wanna try my huggles, first hit is free."

Dirk smiles, just a tiny almost-invisible bit. "Sorry, bro, this bod needs to stay straight edge to keep in perfect condition."

They fist-bump instead. It works for him. He waves, blank-faced, until they disappear in the elevator and gets back in.

This time when he locks the door he puts the chain on it, too.

He lobs the pillows back up to the mezzanine and drags himself up after them, doesn't even bother getting up, he can only stand straight by the edge anyway; he shuffles on hands and knees to his futon and crawls on and flops face-down on it.

Karkat is curled up in his corner and growling quietly. He glowers back at Dave for a minute before he unfolds, shaking his wings out and folding them smoothly down his back.

He treads cautiously on the edge of the futon. Dave rolls on his side and reaches for his shoulder, curves halfway behind his neck. Guides him closer.

Karkat stares down at him for another long moment before he allows himself to be toppled down beside Dave. His knee spurs nudge at Dave's thighs; Dave can feel his body warmth even through the gap between them. He digs his fingers in his hair again, pets gently; Karkat lids his eyes and makes a rusty little noise of approval.

This is nice. Dave likes this. It's comfortable. He could sleep like this. And he's so tired, today's been exhausting and nothing even really happened, what the hell. It's a little too cool, so he pulls a blanket up with his toes, drags it up his side, drapes it over the two of them. There, cocoon.

Karkat blinks at him for a second, his head on Dave's pillow, all his pointy bits loose, and then he makes a little determined frown and drapes his wing over Dave's head.

Dave closes his eyes, before he starts melting too much.

He's almost asleep, fingertips tracing thin, vein-streaked membranes on automatic, when Karkat goes, "So. Dinner?"

Dave starts feeling around for a pillow to bury his face in.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (once again not real links.)

Day two of his leave. Dave is making a list.

**1\. anything with sugar in it (confirmed)**  
 **2\. having his hair/skull petted (confirmed)**  
 **3\. beating up people (might be more mental than physical but)**  
 **4\. lounging in sunbeams (joint: photographic evidence)**  
 **5\. a good breeze (should have opened the windows to clear the air before today meh whatevs)**

It's a list of all the physical things Karkat enjoys. Kinda sparse. Dave is now noting down hypotheses, things to try out if he gets a chance.

**6\. chin scratches ??**  
 **7\. making out ????? (fuckin' hope)**

He's sitting on the wide window ledge of the main room, downstairs. Karkat is once again on the mezzanine, propped up on that windowsill. He's watching the sky, nubwings twitching and tilting with the faintest touch of breeze.

**~~8\. flying ? (shit good luck w/ that one)  
~~ 8\. stretching ?**  
 **9\. wing membranes petted ? (light touch theyre hella thin)**  
 ~~ **10\. sex ha ha i kid fffff**~~

Yesterday was day vegetate by the TV and be a lazy asshole re: feeding. (Dave managed to wring two mildly unsatisfying orgasms out of his Rose-traumatized dick via previously used cuddlebuddy self-job method; didn't have the mental fortitude to attempt to help Karkat enjoy the process at the time. At least the guy looked more bored than traumatized.)

Karkat catches him looking his way and frowns, but decides to ignore him, taking a few seconds to flick a bit of lint or a pillow feather off his shoulder or something.

Dave's best camera is on his lap. (It's been ever since he woke to find his morning wood surrounded by a cage of claws; Karkat had apparently captured it when Dave kept poking it at him. Gorgeous contrast -- shiny-smooth, slate-colored chitin and anthracite needle points over veined, flushed skin, and a good thing he's really visual even as guys go because as a handjob it was mildly awkward and terrifying as hell and he had to finish it himself.) He takes breaks from his list to document shit.

Like now. Yep, documenting that.

**#fuckyeahpetdemon demon batting at sunbeam from top of stairs http://flickr.com/photo...**

... And that.

**#fuckyeahpetdemon demon on the floor after falling off stairs http://flickr.com/photo...**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon grace incarnate**

"You okay, dude?" he asks (after he took the time to type and send the file. Never said he wasn't an asshole.)

"Fuck you."

Karkat looks more embarrassed than in pain, but there's a dent in the floor. Dave thumbs out of his list, pockets the phone; he lets his camera hang from his neck and gets up. "No, seriously, dude. It hurt anywhere?"

"I just tripped, for fuck's sake, I'm fine. Go away."

Dave crouches next to him and pokes him in the cheek until Karkat looks at him, making grumpy noises. "Cause if you have bruises, a hot shower could help. D'you, hm, like hot showers?" he asks, subtle and natural as a master of information gathering. He is so ninja. Karkat gives him a 'you are such a _dead_ ninja, wow' look.

"... That thing... in the sun. It was dust, right?" Karkat asks with the frown of someone figuring things out. Unpleasant things.

"Yep."

"And we only see it when it's in direct sunlight, but it's _everywhere_."

"Yep."

"Wow, suddenly I don't want to breathe."

"Whoops, vetoed. If you stop breathing I'mma get hella bothered. Not the good kind of bothered."

Karkat rolls his eyes at him. He doesn't move away, though, Dave likes it when he does that, when he doesn't just shuffle close for a feeding and then scamper out of range of Dave's cooties.

"... I don't mind water in general, I think."

"Huh. Think you'd like swimming?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

Dave makes a mental note to write down _10\. pool/river ???_ in his list later on. (At least three interrogation points. Yeah. Maybe four. This is promising! Okay, the city pool is out as a gay pride float, but who does he know amongst his colleagues who has a house and maybe at least a Jacuzzi...)

"Is that about your quest to convince me to like the meat suit?"

Dave gives a helpless shrug. "Mind if I test something out?"

He nudges the underside of Karkat's chin with his fingertips. It's velvety there, dips into a little V between the rings of interlocking armor around his throat so he can bend his neck (can't quite touch his chin to his collarbone though.) Dave strokes it lightly, from chin to throat.

"Mnrr."

"Bad or good?"

"... Okay. I guess."

It's Karkaty for _yes, proceed_. Score. He doesn't seem super convinced, though, for all that he lifts his chin, stretches his neck. There's a little furrow between his brows.

On impulse Dave leans in and kisses his lips, light and dry.

"Oh god, are you going to fondle my _face_ with your flesh bits now."

Dave has very inappropriate thoughts of cockslapping. Yeah, uh, no. "Don't pretend you don't know what a kiss is, you pest."

Karkat tilts his head, purses those lips Dave just kissed -- fff, shark fangs or not he wants to do it properly. "You're going red."

"Wow, fuck you, it's a delicate biological process and it's the height of rude to point it out."

"You're going even more red."

"No, seriously, stop. Why are you in my face."

Karkat stares at him, nose to nose. "A non-negligible percentage of your blood has decided to migrate to your face. It's interesting, okay?"

... Blood. Of course. Dave sighs, deflates. "Yeah, well, it stays under my skin today."

"Mnh. It's interesting anyway."

Okay.

Dave pulls out his phone and types,

**10\. pool/river ????**  
 **11\. feeling sweet hemoglobin running through my (peoples??) veins wow not creepy at all you creeping creeper**

When he looks up Karkat is craning his neck to see his screen and squinting in a disapproving way.

"This list is ridiculous and you are ridiculous for writing it. What are those scratched out bits?"

"Whoops, look at that, it turned itself off, magic. Where will smartphones stop."

Hm. The shell on his shoulder is still cracked. Dave pokes at the smooth surface a few inches away from it.

"Come closer to the window, will ya, I want to take a look at it."

Karkat grumbles but follows him to the window ledge, perches beside him. He's leaning on his hands, feet loosely crossed at a joint Dave is not sure he can call an ankle. The late morning light comes from behind and up, throws interesting shadows on his face, his body. Dave resists the urge to take another picture. Portrait of Casual Demon.

Dave sits beside him, a knee folded on the ledge, and leans in to get a better look. He thinks he sees vague reddish-brown shadows underneath the shell through the gray, but it's hard to be sure. "Hm. Wonder what it's made of and if it's going to heal at all. Or if you're just going to keep a very manly scar. Where else did you get hit again?"

Today Karkat must feel mellow, because he points them out and doesn't say anything. Dave peers and squints, and then pokes one on the piece of shell that looks like a lower-rib cover. "I'm still not sure how much you feel through that."

Karkat purses his lips. "I'm not sure how much you imagine I should be feeling. Due to not having a basis for comparison. You haven't forbidden me to shit on your belongings yet, though, so keep poking at your own fucking risk."

"Dude, you do have a basis for comparison." Dave pokes his cheek. Gray velvet. His finger leaves a lighter, silvery track for a second before the hair unbends back into place. Karkat snaps his teeth at him, not close enough to be worrying.

"Surprise, I feel more things where there's hairs on it and where it's actually thin enough to bend! Shocking discovery, I know, I could not stop playing with myself when I found that out."

Karkat's deadpan look says the exact contrary. Dave is almost sad. Such a gorgeous masturbation mention setup.

( _ ~~12\. masturbation?????????? oh lord please ill be so good~~_ )

"Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it. Could be hella fun." But thinking about it is not conducive to other business or the state of cleanliness of his pants, and Karkat hasn't yet mentioned he was hungry or even vaguely looked like it so getting interested anyway makes him feel like a dirty old lecher. He ruthlessly changes the topic. "Do you feel what happens to the shell itself, or only when there's enough pressure to push against the meaty bits inside?"

Karkat briefly looks puzzled. "I... have no idea." He stares at Dave's finger as Dave touch his shoulder, light as he possibly can. "No, I don't -- ah, I think I do. Huh. It's weak."

Dave cups his cheek, butterfly-light. It feels really strange to do these things, even in the name of scientific experimentation.

"Yeah, I feel that from the start."

"Is it a bad feeling or a eh, neutral feeling?"

Karkat hisses quietly; there's crickety noises underlining it, Dave really wonders how his voice box is arranged. "Not good enough to be worth the amount of bullshit I'm dealing with."

Dave chooses to interpret it as still somewhat good. Blind optimism for the win.

Christ but this is awkward. Sitting here looking for excuses to feel up his demon, covering it up in transparent bullshit 'reasons'.

"Okay. Listen." He can feel himself reddening, again. He looks away. Oh, look at that, on the other side of the street, a brick wall and a _roof_! Splendid view. "Yesterday I asked you if I could try making you feel good. If -- if you're down with some experimentation, you can tell me any time. Unless we're, like, busy with job shit or out in public or I'm nursing a broken leg I'm not going to even pretend I won't be down with it."

He gets up from the window ledge, a bit brusquely, puts a hand on his camera to still its swinging. He can't even look Karkat in the eye, wow.

"In the meantime I'm gonna shut my trap about it, in case you not answering was actually your answer. Ball's in your court. Wanna go jogging?"

Master of Smooth. It is him. Woo.

There's no response for a handful of seconds, and then Karkat snorts, almost a snicker. "Masterful change of topic. I'm impressed. Also fuck you, you're supposed to rest."

Dave is totally not pouting. "No, fuck _you_ , I rested all of yesterday, bored now."

"Also where do you plan to go jogging, exactly, turdbrain? Because if someone shoots at me in the street I am going to be really fucking cross." He flicks at the shield at his neck, disdainful, claws clinking against the metal. "It's not like you can really see what this goddamn thing even is from more than a few feet away."

Dave's been getting used to seeing it there. Seeing Karkat acknowledge it, though, is a bit like getting kicked in the crotch in a disturbingly sexy way. Balls: crushed. Unf.

"You got a point. Let me show you wonders." Dave pockets his keys, makes sure his camera is well-secured, slips his gun holster on, and climbs the ladder to the mezzanine. Karkat follows slowly, confused, as Dave pushes the window open.

The second Dave swings his legs outside the windowsill, though, he is there in a single, hurried leap.

"Tadahh. Secret escape."

The fire escape stops at living room level, but there's an old, rusted-looking metal ladder that goes up to the roof there. Dave whispers to Aradia, who assures him it's still some time away from breaking under the weight of someone much heftier than he is, and climbs up.

"What the hell are you doing?"

When he looks over his shoulder Karkat is craning his neck to squint up at him; he's not even leaning out his whole head. Dave purses his lips.

"What's the matter? Scared?"

"You forbade me to go out of the window, assnugget!"

"... Oh right." Dave finishes climbing, hauls himself up on the roof. It's slanted pretty steeply; he sits on the small horizontal-ish end and plants his heels on a rung. "Karkat Vantas, the order not to go out the window is amended. You still can't, except for when you're with me." Oh, wait. "Or when there's a fire inside or something else that'd kill or maim you if you stayed in. Now come on already, you scared of heights or something?"

Karkat hisses under his breath as he swings out of the window. He scales the ladder with a lizardly, inhuman grace that Dave can't get enough of, wings spread and kept flat to the wall like, Dave isn't sure, like their clawed ends might help grab a hold? He wonders if the comparatively thin digits would hold Karkat's weight; his own fingers aren't any thicker, but they're shorter too, reduces the risk of breakage.

He moves cautiously into a low crouch on the edge and makes his way around the corner, where another, lower building leans on his building. That roof is flat; he grabs the edge with his hands and lets himself drop.

Karkat snorts at his caution and leaps, sends gravel flying on landing. He shakes his wings out, sets them at what Dave would call a jaunty angle, and scans his surroundings with something Dave would _not_ call well-disguised interest. It's such a sad attempt at camouflage, at this point he'd get more coverage from a cardboard bush.

Dave bends over to grab his ankles, rounds his back, releases and crouches, stretches one leg then the other, rotates his wrists, rolls his head on his neck. Slapdash, as warming up goes, but he's not doing competitive parkour today, only the family Sunday jog version.

He likes it up here, it's all slanted roofs and tarred roofs and gravel roofs and sometimes surprise garden roofs and dozens other kinds, and chimneys and a bazillion satellite dishes over bare brick walls. There's sparrows and pigeons in sight, but apart from that there's only the forest of roofs and the sky.

He still makes sure to go in the rough direction of the hell gate. Less of a risk of startling people enjoying a smoke at their window.

He jogs down the roof, hops on the guard wall along the edge, bounces off an exposed strut-brick-thing and side-vaults up on the next roof. Ow, barked his ankle bone, rusty. Karkat trots after him, at first frowning and sticking close to Dave's heels, but that only lasts as long as it takes him to startle his first cat.

"No trophies, Karkat, I support responsible hunting! You'd better eat whatever you catch, fur and all!"

Dave just about falls off his perch laughing when Karkat screeches to a stop in the middle of the chase to glare at him. "Thanks, asshole, you just ruined it."

They explore, right and left and down and up, Dave ambling along with his hands in his pockets and more than half the time just going wherever Karkat seemed interested in going. Eventually, though, the vibe in the air just... hm.

Even considering the likelihood that shitty only-a-starving-student-would-take-this studio apartments would be well-cared for, that's a lot of rusted-shut shutters and broken windows. And it's been a while since Karkat startled a pigeon.

"Karkat? How far are we to the borderlands?"

"We're in them."

Welp.

"... Okay, we might want to be out of them."

"It's just the very edge," Karkat grumbles, "I wouldn't risk you deeper in."

Well, it's nice to know that. Dave walks up to him; he's perched on an old fence supposed to keep him from accessing the fire escape, he looks like a panther on the hunt. Maybe a very small dragon. Dave is told that in places where the gates open in less urban areas dragons can be an actual thing that actually exists. Dirk showed him pictures but Dave is still not convinced it wasn't photoshop. Some of the pixels were a little dubious.

"There's still people living around here, it's not like the places we went to the other day. It's probably okay."

"If we were in a novel this is totally where we hear someone scream."

"If we _what_ ," Karkat replies flatly.

Dave prods him lightly in the side, just to watch him flare and flap his wings to fix his balance. The thin membranes show a latticework of veins underneath the late morning light. "Dude, haven't you heard of tropes. You're basically jinxing us. Only worse thing you could say would be 'Don't be silly, what could happen,' or maybe 'yeah, this is a picture of my loving fiancée Christy.'"

He takes a picture of Karkat on his fence and the pale pink spreads and dark tangles of veins of his flared wings against the sky.

Karkat turns away in a huff and drops on the other side of the fence.

"No, wait--"

Except fire escapes around the place have a decent amount of iron in them, and while it's not _cold_ iron it still stings, so Karkat leaps across the little backstreet to the next building over like a startled frog. He catches a window ledge and hangs there with wings and hands, hissing in displeasure. Crap. Dave climbs the fence.

"I was _about_ to say, let's start back, it'll be lunch time soon."

Karkat almost, almost jumps back to him, no matter the amount of displeasure he eyes the landing with.

But then he freezes. Legs gathered against his chest, planted on the wall, he pushes up and away from the wall until his arms are horizontal, and he cranes his neck. They're three stories up and Dave doesn't like it much, even though Karkat could probably stay hanging on the wall another half hour before he felt the strain, gargoyle that he is.

"Karkat?"

His eyes have gone fire-bright; he almost doesn't answer, and when he does it comes out a bit dazed. "Fresh blood."

Shit. Shiiit. For him to react like that, there must be a lot of it. Dave scans the backstreet under them; no one in sight, not even a dog. Might be a cat somewhere under that trash piled up in the corners, he supposes. The source is probably elsewhere.

Shit. He thumbs his phone on, so he'll be ready to call it in the second he has anything concrete to mention, makes sure his vest isn't blocking his gun. Orders, "Track it."

Karkat lets himself drop -- shit -- one story, and then he catches the next window, and the next. Dave starts running down the metal stairs; they clang loud under his feet, and it's a problem to announce his presence like this but someone is hurt _now_.

_Aradia. Latula. Standby, please._

_Sure thing, Dave!_ Aradia goes. _Ooh, can I watch?_

 _Yeah, why not._ He gathers her close, behind his eyes. He jumps off the fire escape; Karkat is already peering past the corner, impatient.

"With our luck it'll be a dog that got hit by a car and is looking for somewhere to die in peace," he mutters as he checks the street. "Okay, go."

Karkat doesn't answer, just races ahead. Dave follows, a hand on the butt of his gun.

The streets are pretty empty for a block Dave thought still had some inhabitants. Okay, no, fuck that noise. "Dispatch, this is Detective-Summoner Dave Strider. Demon scented blood, we're tracking the source. Requesting my phone tracked--"

" _Copy -- ah, you seem to be at the edge of the zone of interference, be aware the signal might vanish. Do you need support?_ "

"Not yet; could be an animal. Checking back in five."

" _Copy. Checking back in five._ "

"Over." He hangs up; belatedly it occurs to him that he has a specialist at hand. "Karkat? Is it human blood?"

Karkat doesn't look back, answers absently, "Yes."

Oh. Okay. He calls back. "Dispatch, this is Detective-Summoner Dave Strider. Demon confirms it's human blood."

" _Copy. Dispatching a vehicle now._ "

He starts jogging a little faster.

He's been seeing splatters here and there, and they might not be huge puddles but they're regular; the wound is not clotting. Dave and Karkat dodge into one street, then west through a covered parking lot, then south. Neither a straight line nor the shortest path to anything. The wounded person is trying to lose someone.

Also bouncing into walls and light poles some. Huh.

They've got to be running pretty fast, for a wounded person, but adrenaline and mortal terror can do a lot of awesome things for a person's Olympic medal prospects.

Karkat screeches to a stop, ignores the blood before him, veers into a side street. Dave stumbles to follow. "What the --"

"Doubled back. Fresher here."

"Huh, 'kay." Dave seriously hopes he's tracking mystically and not with his nose, there's so much trash in this alley, wow.

Karkat growls, irritated. "But seriously, where the fuck is that--"

A screech of tires. People running -- oh hey, _there's_ that scream.

"Police!" Dave calls, gun out, one hand clenched on Karkat's shoulder to keep him safely behind the corner. A truck speeds up past them. Dark blue, riding low, scratches down the right side by the back --

Someone is screaming again.

Karkat is in the poor dude's face; might be why. Dave eyes the red handprints the guy leaves on the pavement as he tries to scramble away from his demon right through the wall at his back, and does a quick area check before he aims his gun down and away.

"Karkat, step back. Check the perimeter. Sir? It's okay, I'm a police officer."

Karkat is growling nonstop as he obeys, prowling back and forth before them, checking nearby streets and doors and ground-floor windows. Dear fuck does he want Jade with him now. She knows how to talk someone down; Dave never really took to it.

"Sir, it's safe. Tell me where you're injured. Sir?"

The man keeps making little whimpery noises, and his eyes -- huh. Dave moves slowly from right to left before him, and... yeah, his eyes aren't tracking. Fff. He gets his phone back out. "Dispatch, this is Detective-Summoner Dave Strider. I've got an injured party, truck seen fleeing from the scene, break--"

" _Copy. Ambulance dispatched, go ahead."_

"Truck is dark blue, several vertical scratches down right side, lacking plates, model and make..."

Watching his still-trembling, still not-tracking victim, Dave keeps describing. Karkat is following something in the middle of the street. There're no cars, so Dave doesn't bother to tell him to move. He just makes a note to ask what he's looking for later. Looks like the man's shaking is stopping; this is good.

"Solid copy. Over." Done reporting, just gotta wait. He pockets his phone, takes a step toward the wounded man.

He's in his forties, Chinese or maybe Korean, and he looks scared, confused, and Dave's been a cop a little while now so he's not as surprised as he would otherwise be when the man stumbles forward into the gutter and comes out swinging part of someone's bumper.

He doesn't even look at Dave, he goes straight for Karkat, slamming the thing down with strength born of pure despair.

Dave lands on his back like a ton of bricks.

There's red blooming on ash-gray, he can see flashes between two rodeo-worthy bounces; how the fuck did a human break the oh shit not the _shell_ , Karkat was in the process of twisting around and rearing up to face the threat, leading with his knee. Now he's a few steps away, kneeling, hands clenched on his thigh and hissing and spitting in shocked anger, and shit, _shit_.

He manages to slip his arms under the man's arm and haul him around so that Karkat is no longer in his line of sight; doing that, he can feel blood, the man's. It's spreading all over the place, his vest is going to be ruined, and how is he supposed to secure the guy without worsening his wounds? He doesn't even know _where_ \--

Okay, breathe, help's coming. "Karkat, status!" he calls out.

"I'm bleeding, fuckface!" Karkat replies, in a tight, tense voice. "It hurts, fuck, I hate this body."

"How bad --"

"It hurts!" Karkat snaps back. "I don't know!"

Dave tells himself Karkat still sounds in control, not overwhelmed, so it can't be too bad. The man is growing weaker under him; he's sobbing, begging, Dave can't even tell if he doesn't understand because panic makes the man inarticulate or if he's perhaps speaking some other language, it's all a bunch of mumbling and sobbing whimpers, it's pathetic in a horribly uncomfortable way. Poor dude sounds beyond even terrified.

"Hey, calm down, it's okay. Calm down, help's coming. Don't fight me so much, you're hurting yourself, shit, are you even listening? No, it's okay, it's fine, you're gonna be fine."

He hears a motor and turns his head; a police car parking a little way down the street. A pair of patrollers exit the vehicle and jog briskly to him, scanning the street, hands on their guns. Dave breathes.

"Tanner, Herrera! Take over, I need to check on my demon."

The older of the pair moves to him. "Herrera, get the first aid kit," he says. Dave slides out from under him, lets him take on the job of pinning the man down. Tanner has about thirty pounds on Dave, he'll manage.

"He's injured but I'm not sure where. Been bleeding pretty steadily for a while," Dave says over his shoulder as he goes. "He's also reacting like he's either drugged or having a psychotic break. Combative; won't track people, _will_ track demons, doesn't even look like he hears any questions, much less answer them..."

Karkat is still curled around his thigh. He's making cricket noises; it sounds quieter, softer than the ones underlining his usual hisses, more like he's trying to soothe himself.

"Let me take a look, buddy," Dave says quietly as he kneels beside him.

"Can't," Karkat grits out, eyes closed, eyebrows knit. "Keeping my blood in. Cut a few veins."

"At least it's not arteries," Dave says, and gets growled at. He can see the edges of some purpling already around Karkat's hands, wow, the bumper must have impacted full on.

It hit with the torn end; Dave looks at the abandoned weapon and sees a few traces of blood on sharp twisted edges.

"Can you tell if you've got any broken bones?"

"No, I don't." He breathes in and out. "I guess it's not too bad. I'll live. Fuck, it hurts."

"Sorry I can't let you eat the guy," Dave says, trying for sympathetic. Karkat looks at him like he just started babbling about ponies.

"Uh. Yes? Of course you can't, you're oath-sworn to protect his ass."

He says it like it hadn't even gone through his head to even want vengeance, like he can't even imagine how it even went through _Dave's_. Dave catches himself smiling at his demon. Okay, wow, spectacularly bad time for warm glows. He gets up and goes to the first aid kit. Herrera has found some lacerations on the dude's back and side and is applying pressure. Dave takes some bandages and a pad for himself, sprinkles disinfectant on it, and goes back to Karkat.

"Will it gush if you take your hand off?" It shouldn't, not if no artery was touched, but Dave thinks it's the first time Karkat has been cut and it's obviously stressing him out way more than being shot ever did.

"... Guess not." But he's biting his lip in the short time between lifting his palms away and Dave sliding the pad over it.

Dave makes Karkat hold the pad in place as his hands slide up and down and around his thigh with the roll of bandage. He supposes the partial shell makes it so he can't make it too tight, can't cut off blood flow, but he's still careful that way.

"You'll be fine. We'll get Jane or Jade to fix you up."

Karkat's head is bowed; he mumbles under his breath, "He just got me because I couldn't kill him."

Like hell, he was just caught by surprise. "Duh," Dave says anyway, and ruffles his hair.

\--

They spend lunch hour and half the afternoon at the hospital waiting for the single doctor-summoner in the whole building to get free. Dude's a Sylph of Time, and he's got a contract with a perfect -- if a mere Class Three -- match, which basically means Dave gets to spend fifteen minutes mentally hassling Aradia for being unable to do that thing where the Doc and his rider just speed up cell division and age the lacerations until they're clean and closed, simple lines of scabs that'll fall in a couple of days.

_I don't make things older anyway! Though I guess if we practiced a ton I might manage to time-lock only a few cells in someone's body... okay, no, perhaps more like a chunk of cells... Precision is hard!_

_Cool anyway. Wonder what would happen? Keep a wound from gushing, maybe?_

_... I think the rest of the dude's bod would think it had a slab of rock imbedded in,_ says Latula cautiously.

_... Okay never mind._

Damara drifts by to whisper about what a convenient assassination technique it would be -- freeze someone's heart, let them die, let it go, no autopsy would show anything wrong; Dave rolls his eyes and then flatters her, asking why he'd bother twisting Aradia to that end when he can just call in the specialist she is.

\--

"See," Dave says as he walks into the police station, "I told you you'd jinxed us."

Head low, wings drooping some, Karkat limps in after him; he's still bruised up, but Dave thinks the cautious way he moves comes more from a superstitious fear of reopening well-closed wounds. "What the fuck," he prompts obligingly anyway. "I did _not_ jinx us. How the hell would I do that, do I look like a Knight of fucking Light to you."

Dave presses the elevator button. No stairs for Karkat today. "You said 'it's probably okay,' and then bam! a scream."

His demon cranes his neck to give him a jaundiced look. "It doesn't count, I went _looking_ for something that bled. Something that bleeds and something that screams, make a Venn diagram and of course there'll be overlap, fuckwit."

"Nope, totally jinxed us." He ushers Karkat in the elevator.

"... That's not the right floor," he says when they come out.

"Nah, we're going to report the incident to the assault and battery dudes."

Only when he tracks down Herrera she tells him she's about to climb up to Demon Crimes (Demon Control and Demon-Assisted Crimes and Misdemeanors; somehow DCA-DACAM never caught on, wonder why) to join Tanner. Huh.

"We'll tag along then."

In the elevator once again Herrera throws little glances at Karkat, who ignores her royally as he tries to find the best way to crouch while leaning on a single leg.

"He's pretty well-behaved."

Karkat snorts. "I'm pretty well restricted to within an inch of my life, it's an everyday wonder I'm allowed to speak."

Dave snorts back, nudges his shoulder with his knee. "Dude, I'd never do that to you, and for an excellent, pure-hearted reason: mimes are fucking terrifying, okay." He turns to Herrera, who looks a little embarrassed, a little amused too. "Also, he lies, he's secretly a marshmallow. The other day he totally exceeded orders. I almost swooned."

Karkat almost looks embarrassed. "Once again. _I will shit on everything you own._ "

"Whoops, better close that loophole while I'm ahead."

He doesn't, though. The elevator opens and he follows a chuckling Herrera out to Detective-Summoner Burnett's desk. Burnett is rated up to Third Class only -- doesn't have the juice for higher -- but she knows her theory down to her fingertips, and she's a brilliant detective besides, for all that she looks like someone's cuddly soccer mom.

Also she's a Knight of Rage. Dave has it as a general principle not to mess with Rage peeps. Especially not the wreck-your-shit classes.

"Strider. I _thought_ the bullpen was pretty quiet this morning." He shakes her hand, nods a hey-you-again to Tanner.

"Aw, didja miss my sweet dulcet tones? I can make you a mix, you'll never be without my voice--" He drags a chair from another, empty cubicle, eyes Karkat and his injured leg. Pushes the chair against the wall and arches an eyebrow meaningfully at him, and goes back for a fourth chair.

Burnett chuckles, and says nothing about the demon cautiously sitting himself at the desk with the rest of them. Dave takes place in the last gap. "That was not actually a complaint. The complaint would be more like _right now_. Alright, report."

He describes the stuff he summarized for Dispatch; went on a jog, demon scented blood, tracked it down, arrived at the scene to find victim and fleeing truck...

"It must have been full in the back, the bumper was borderline eating asphalt."

"Mnh. With the gouges down the side it should be relatively noticeable, and yet... We've been looking, but so far no results."

"How do they look? Your people," Karkat asks, and Dave is surprised enough to turn and stare at him. He hasn't really been curious about the job before. Dave can see Tanner's brow knitting at the interruption, but he ignores that.

"Uh. With their... eyes?" By Karkat's annoyed frown he can tell he's missing the point. "I mean, they're patrolling and doing their stuff, so they keep an eye out for vehicles and people that look suspicious. Stuff like that. Why?"

"... Because _illusions are a thing that exists_."

Tanner frowns. "The cost of maintaining one--"

" _And_ the investigation's been handed over to the demon division, so you're already suspecting a summoner. What would it cost them, exactly? I know some demons of Light that you can buy for a brass coin, provided it's shiny."

Burnett coughs in her hand. "Yes, that... is pretty much why I was not hoping for much about the truck, though that's still more than we've learned about the other assaults. Well-reasoned."

Because of course there's been other assaults, else she wouldn't have been given the case. "So what are we looking at?" Dave asks, over Karkat's "you'd have to be brain-dead to miss it."

Detective Burnett goes grave. "So far? Counting yours, six victims. All driven insane. One suicide, one person dead from what the doctors tell me was a terror-induced heart attack. The rest won't communicate intelligibly, won't react to outside stimulus, and exist in a permanent state of mortal fear."

Dave frowns. "They do react to outside stimulus, my guy saw Karkat just fine and then he tried to brain him. That was pretty well-coordinated."

"Huh. He could have been sensitive to the magical aura, even when all his other senses were scrambled, or the single point of demonic energy was the only thing distinct enough from the background brouhaha to target..." She turns to Karkat, who blinks in surprise. "Any ideas?"

Dave watches his demon hesitate. It's like he kind of wants to participate, but at the same time -- Dave watches his hand rise to touch the leather rope at his throat; his quills sag, his eyes go flat, bitter.

Dave says, pretend-casual, "I'll get you marshmallows as a consulting fee. They're nothing but pure sugar. You'll love them."

"Hm."

"A whole bag of them."

"How big is that?" Karkat asks, interested and trying to hide it. Dave shows him with his hands. "Hmm. Okay, why the fuck not, if you think I'm hiding relevant stuff you'll just order me anyway. I don't, it's just a thought. If a demon did it then it probably created a bond with the victim, so either it's still active and you can follow it, or it's broken and flapping in the breeze and attracted to other demons as a source of power, and if you don't tie it off it's going to keep spilling the poor assholes' life energy into the ether until they die."

Burnett is still, her eyes on Dave's demon. It's the hound sighting prey look. "We knew about the potential for a bond, but not how to track it."

Karkat arches an eyebrow at her. "Get a Seer to do it."

"What type?" she asks, all business.

Karkat stares back at her, silent, for a long moment, like he's weighing something in his mind.

"Tell me about the affair."

"Confidentiality issues--"

"Get the douche in stupid shades to order me not to give information to anyone not officially part of the investigation."

She weighs the suggestion in turn, nods. Dave gives the order. He's kind of fascinated. He wonders if it's because Burnett is a Knight...

"The victims are part of, or related to, an organized crime group. We believe this is the start of a war."

... well, fuck.

She keeps speaking, voice low so it won't carry, measured. "Those are typically pretty bad for a city, and with the Midnight Crew and the Felt's wars alone we already have had some of the highest body counts across the country. If this is a new player, things are going to get really bad."

"Civilians?"

"Have had their buildings and houses burned as collateral damage or for refusing services, have been shot or injured or traumatized by being in the wrong place at the wrong time..."

Karkat lifts a hand to stop her. He's staring at the table, not that he's really seeing it. He's chewing at his black lip, a couple of fangs peeking out.

"Use Kankri," he says, abrupt. He's oddly tense. Dave thinks of all the times the two demons of Blood have snapped at each other for accidentally unveiling ridiculously tiny hints.

This... there's a reason here that makes Blood the best element to track the aggressors. Not Light, with its clear view of events, not Mind's insight into motives, reactions, not Space's locating ability.

He... cares. He _cares_ , he does, he fucking _cares_. It's not orders. It's not because _Dave_ cares, Dave never gave any order that might change his feelings on anything, he's not even in Dave's head like Latula and Aradia are and even _they_ were never all that influenced. Dave kind of wants to smush his cheeks. A lot. Maybe even smile.

Karkat pauses, frowns. "If he hurries. The signature will fade fast."

Burnett snatches her phone, calls Rose. Dave leans back in his chair. Well. Not bad for a day's work. Where they weren't even supposed to be working.

"Do you know what type the demon was?" Officer Herrera asks.

Karkat shakes his head, frowning. "Sensing isn't my thing."

As they wait for Burnett to be done with her phone call, Dave slips his fingers through Karkat's hair and scratches gently against his skull. It feels like fur, between the quills. The tense set of Karkat's wings relaxes a little. After a minute he seems to notice he's being petted again and shakes Dave's fingers out of his hair with a little embarrassed pout.

Burnett finishes, makes a few notes, thanks the officers for their report. Dave stays, since thanking them and not him wasn't especially subtle. She doesn't look at him, though, she looks at Karkat.

"Do you require feeding?"

Karkat perks up, makes a soft, interested trill, and then sneaks Dave a look like Dave could possibly say no.

"Require, perhaps not yet, but he's been injured today so I think it really wouldn't hurt. Thanks, Burnett."

"No problem. You were pretty helpful, Karkat." She gets out a syringe and cotton from her lowest drawer, cleans a spot inside her elbow, pricks herself. Dave can cut himself and never flinch, but syringes still make him look away, vaguely queasy. Karkat is staring like a cat at a mouse hole. "I can't afford a lot, sorry."

She places cotton on the beading hole, twists the needle off, offers Karkat the full tube. He cradles it in his clawed hand, staring down at it for a few seconds.

"If it had a top I could keep it."

Dave blinks. "You'd want to?"

"... Maybe?" But he shrugs and tilts his head back and sucks it empty. Ew. Dave doesn't know why that's more gross than being bitten and drunk straight from the source, or licked at, but it kind of is anyway.

"I'm not sure what you'd do with it either," Burnett says with good humor.

"I don't know, damn it, it was just a thought. Once I've digested it I won't be able to find you anymore, is all."

"You'd... want to?"

Karkat glowers at her and kicks at the desk like a sulky little kid. Dave snorts, incredulous. "Aw, he likes you."

The glare Karkat spears him with would be soul-withering if it came packed with even a flicker of actual power. "I'm not kidding about the shitting on your things, assmongler. Where's my bag of marshmallows? Are you trying to get someone else to pay up for you again?"

"Yeah, yeah. Come on, let's go. If we're done here?" He hopes they are, he's hungry. The hospital food would have sucked anyway, and he didn't want to leave Karkat alone in a room for fear of an unwary nurse wandering in, so he hasn't had any lunch. He's sure they sell marshmallows somewhere nearby.

She waves them off. "Sure. I'll call if I need anything else."

They get up, Dave puts the chairs back, and then trails through the cubicles to say hi on his way to the elevator. His colleagues are calling to each other, joking a bit between two reports.

"Hey, Roxy." Technically Roxy is his cousin, but she's also his twin sister's adopted big sister. So. "How's my fave sib doing."

"Hey, Dave! Hey Karkat." She waggles her eyebrows, and then she _leers_. Coming close, Dave realizes, was a terrible idea. "So when can I drop in? You gotta give me you guys' feeding schedule."

"How 'bout you don't drop in at all. Or call first like a civilized being, that'd be swell. Where's your other half?"

Roxy, thankfully, doesn't call him out on the change of topic. "Jakey? Downstairs in the basement, with poor Erisol. It's had to stay at the station, the bond with Jake isn't too solid and besides it's kind of freaky-looking and really wouldn't fit in a car. You'd need a truck at least, maybe a school bus even."

A truck. A demon in a truck. "... Karkat? Wait here with Roxy, be right back."

Burnett purses her lips at him when she sees him coming back. He arches a suave eyebrow.

"Hey, just a hunch, the truck might be heavy because the demon is corporeal."

They exchange grim looks. Corporeal demons might be more easily killable, for ridiculous values of easy, but they're also bound way more solidly and can't fuck off when they get tired of being asked to provide the same task over and over when they're getting spiritually fireballed at; they have no choice, they're here until released and there's no sell-by date.

"It was just a thought. Okay, going now. Good day."

He gets back to his demon, sitting propped up against the doorjamb of Roxy's cubicle, looking mildly mortified and like he really wants to be elsewhere. Dave quirks an eyebrow; is she flirting with him or what?

He hears her laugh with her neighbor, sees her wave a hand over the partition. "Good luck with that one! Hey, Dave, back already?"

"What was that about?"

Karkat kicks at his ankle. "Marshmallows. Now. You promised. _Hurry up_."

He still isn't looking straight at Roxy. The heck?

"Oh, Marilee just got a report about some dumbass posting pictures of his embodied pet demon online, can you believe that?"

"--Oh. Ha. Haha. Ha."

Um.

He wanders to Marilee's desk, peers very impolitely over her shoulder.

"Well. Shortest investigation ever. Congratulations on your staggering success, Detective."

She looks up at him, an eyebrow up.

"You haven't looked at the pics yet, have you."

"Uh, no."

She does.

A second later she's laughing, five seconds later she's forwarding the url to everyone in Demon Crimes, even as he tries to grab her mouse from her hand. Welp.

"Welp," he tells Karkat, who stares at him and groans and starts bonking his forehead against the closest bit of fake wall. All around his colleagues are laughing their asses off, a ripple of snickers and guffaws that spreads as they're prompted to open their email by chortling neighbors.

Even Captain Egbert comes out, peers over someone's shoulder, chuckles good-naturedly before he claps his hands and sends everyone back to work.

And then of course he fixes Dave and Karkat with a long, pointed look, and asks Dave how he's enjoying his leave.

\--

**#fuckyeahpetdemon concerned citizen anonchan ty for sending cops after my ass if i were criminal summoner id totes want arrested**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon ok no i wouldnt but as i am in fact cop summoner ty for your vigilance citizen**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon here is a demon with a police shield on his head http://tinyurl.com/...**


	10. Chapter Porn. I mean Ten. Yes. I mean that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with this, AO3 has caught up to my backlog. Updates will slow down. No complaining or I'll bite you. >:E

Dave is in the process of cleaning after lunch (read: putting takeout boxes inside each other in order of size, with dirty paper napkins stuffed in the cracks) when his phone rings.

" _Don't quit police work for journalism,_ " is the first thing his brother tells him.

"Wow, I love you too, Dirkiepoo. My article on the buying habits of demons in grocery stores was a success and everyone knows it."

Karkat looks up at hearing the word; Dave shrugs at him. His demon is elbow-blade-deep in a marshmallow bag. It's already half empty. On second thought perhaps Dave shouldn't have let him choose the one he wanted.

[ ](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/post/42316184531/i-swear-i-did-not-draw-all-these-guys-facing-the)

" _We got complaints from the vendor, you scared his other customers off._ "

"Pff, he'll sing another tune when everyone wants to buy shit from his store because it was once patroned by the illustrious Karkat Vantas. Also I asked him if it was okay before coming in and he said yes, so hey, it's all on him."

"You said 'service animal', you asshole," Karkat says, loud enough for the phone to pick up. Dirk scoffs. "You said, 'hello, Detective Strider, do you mind if I come in with my service animal, don't want to leave him in the street.' I should have chosen a bigger bag."

"There was _no_ bigger, Jesus, Karkat, you could stuff your head in that and still have room for a shoulder. Anyway, Dirk, what do you want, answer is no, I'm on leave. Captain said so, you can't make me."

Anyway his latest #fuckyeahpetdemon tweet about Karkat with all his eyes huge as he beholds a veritable wall of confectionaries has about a bazillion retweets, so fuck that noise, Dave has internet fame, he needs nothing else. Another week and he'll totally be able to keep Karkat in the style to which he is accustoming himself way too quickly merely from fan donations. Maybe he should encourage Karkat to start a taste-testing blog.

" _I wasn't asking you anything, or only the way a kid might ask another kid's dad permission to visit._ "

"Uh. Did you just compare yourself and Karkat to children."

" _Nah, I'm talking about Erisol. We're attempting the disincarnating spell tomorrow night. It's pretty anxious about things, think Karkat would want to visit?_ "

"Yes," Karkat throws back, loud and tense, and then he gives Dave a nervous, defiant look like he thinks Dave's going to veto that. Makes him feel all guilty.

"Yeah, okay, we'll drop by. Six thirty PM okay?"

" _Noted. I'll tell the kid. Later, bro. Try not to fall into a slave trafficking ring face-first before then._ "

"No promise, hot as I am I'm eminently traffickable, you know." He's talking to the dial tone by the end. His brother is an asshole. Both his brothers are.

The three of them are a well-matched set that way, he supposes.

"... I bet this spell will hurt like hell," Karkat grumbles, holding his marshmallow bag against his chest like a shield. He's sitting in the corner of the couch, wings curled over his shoulders like a cape. "It hasn't even been tested, too, I bet it could kill it."

[ ](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/post/42316184531/i-swear-i-did-not-draw-all-these-guys-facing-the)

"I already said we'd go, Karkat," Dave replies with a sigh. "And also, you've been eating way too much sugar today."

Karkat bristles, leans forward (thankfully so; he'd rip the couch with his flared back spines otherwise.) "It's mine! You owed it to me. You can't take it back from me."

... Bluh. Dave sighs. "I'm not. But remember how you didn't enjoy shitting, thought it was gross? Throwing up is worse, plus it stinks like vinegar, plus it _hurts_. You want stomach acid all up in your sinuses, bro, don't let me stop you, just make sure you're over the toilet bowl when you go."

Karkat glowers at him and stuffs another very deliberate marshmallow in his toothy maw, gnaws on it resentfully, and then tips off of the couch, landing on all fours on the floor. He purses his lip as he thinks about the logistics, and then stuffs the edge in his mouth and limps that way, glaring at Dave, daring him to say a thing. He scales the ladder, no doubt to go hide the bag in his nest; Dave gathers the takeout carcasses and goes to put them in the kitchen with the rest of the bags he needs to carry down, oh, last week.

" _HRRRRST!_ "

Dave dashes back out of the kitchen, head jerking up. Karkat has gone all spines, wings spread menacingly, back arched, even his little tail up. He stalks closer to the window, a rattlesnake vibrato rising from his throat. Dave moves closer at a jog. "Karkat! What is it?"

"Hsssss!"

Dave pauses with his head a little above the wooden floor, feet on the fourth rung.

"... It's... a crow."

"It won't go away! Tell me I can go out of the window."

Dave gives a slow, slow blink. "How about... no."

Karkat spears him with a quick, incensed look, but apparently his staring contest with the crow is more interesting. "How about yes!"

"Nope. Karkat, what the heck, it's a bird."

"It's a bird that's not afraid. That's _wrong_. It's also a bird that can fly in when I can't go out and it's a bird that I think is relatively smart for some reason that I'm blaming on you, and it's a bird that saw where I hid my marshmallows!"

Dave pinches his lips really hard. Can't laugh. _Can't_. "Yeah, I've been feeding 'em, they're waiting for dinner."

"Well stop feeding them!" Karkat orders with an imperious look. "Starting today. They might as well start getting used to it now."

Dave is still not laughing. He's not sure how. "Yes, sir."

"Good. And also fuck you," Karkat adds absently, still staring his would-be prey in its beady little eye. It caws a mocking challenge; a second crow lands on the windowsill, entirely unafraid.

Karkat charges -- Dave can tell he's planning to stop himself before the glass, he's just trying to scare the birds.

He can also see when his injured thigh reminds him it exists. Karkat flinches, takes all weight off his hurt leg, stumbles and catches himself on his hands. Birds forgotten, he sits heavily on the floor, hands hovering anxiously over his injuries.

"I... something pulled weird. Inside. It -- hurts a bit."

Dave sighs and climbs the rest of the way up. He leans over Karkat's leg, nudges his big, armored, useless hands away to take a better look. The scabs on a couple of lacerations have cracked under the strain and blood is beading out. He feels out the flesh around them cautiously and doesn't get even the threat of his face torn off in retaliation; it can't be too bad. "If a muscle had torn back up I think you'd be making more noise than that. You probably just strained them. Wait here, I'll be right back."

He goes to the bathroom to get cotton and disinfectant, analgesic cream, to the kitchen to get an ice pack. He trudges back up, one-handed, dumps his loot on the futon.

"Come and sit here."

Karkat shuffles closer on his butt, moving himself with his hands and one foot, eyes down in embarrassment. He's all deflated, it's not a good look on him.

[ ](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/post/42316184531/i-swear-i-did-not-draw-all-these-guys-facing-the)

"Wounds 101, just because it doesn't hurt as much doesn't mean it won't give out on you." Dave cleans the scratches, puts little Mickey Mouse bandages on them, more as a reminder than because he believes they're needed. (Of course he has Mickey Mouse bandages, what else, seriously. He used to have Ariel and Simba but John took them all for his fingers the last time he broke one of Dave's glasses.)

He opens the tub of analgesic cream next, puts some on his fingertips, eyes Karkat's thigh. Tries not to think too hard that it's his _inner_ thigh, that it's feather-soft. There's bruises blooming dark and painful, dark enough to see even through the shorn velvet covering them. Karkat won't like having them touched.

He'd let Karkat do it for himself, but the viciously curved, always out claws at his fingertips are no good for that sort of thing. Dave dabs it on here and there, starts rubbing it in, light as he can.

First he has to get it through the fur! It's maybe three millimeters long, that short, but it's densely packed anyway. it'd work better if he could push, but he can't. He keeps massaging in patient little circles, even if he feels anything but.

Karkat is very still under his hand. Good. They just sit side by side on the edge of the futon, Dave with his head bowed over his demon's hurt leg, the incongruous little Mickey bandages. He wants to photograph them, but this time he tells himself no. First, his hands are disgusting.

Second it'd be kinda pornographic. A little bit.

"There," he says, and wipes his hands on an old t-shirt. "It should start feeling a bit better soon. The ice pack should--" He looks at Karkat and Karkat is staring at him all weird, a disbelieving, confused look that has Dave pausing, frowning. "... Karkat? Something wrong?"

"There's not enough," Karkat says abruptly, and looks away. "Add -- add some more."

Dave breathes in. He's sure he's misreading it. Yeah.

He squirts out another dollop of cream, dabs it along the muscle on top of Karkat's thigh, along the shell, and in slow, thorough little circles down the slope of his inner thigh.

He tries not to look at the fork of Karkat's legs, at his smooth, featureless crotch.

He thinks there's scales and plates even here, he can almost feel their edges, only they're so thin and bendy it's almost like they're actually firm skin.

"Think this will be enough?" he asks, and his voice comes out rough and too low.

Karkat meets his eyes, holds them. His jaw is tense, his hands are planted on the futon behind him and his shoulders are up, defensively. His wings are half-curved around his arms.

"Other side. Too."

Oh.

Dave breathes in, and out. He reaches across Karkat's lap. He doesn't even bother with the cream.

He trails his fingers along the edge of the thigh plate, follows it down to the knee, comes back up in soothing little circles. He switches from finger pads to knuckles, to the ball of his thumb, rubbing back-and-forth little arcs. It's so soft, _so_ soft. Oddly resilient too, it feels like the back of his head that time he got a crew cut. He could touch it for hours.

Karkat exhales long and silent and shaky, toward the end. Dave's hand turns so he can fit his palm around the hard muscles of Karkat's inner thigh and squeeze, just a little, squeeze and release. Ah, fuck.

He wants to kiss him. He doesn't want to distract him. He wants to rub his dick where he has his hands, guide Karkat to close his thighs around his shaft, fuck him there; he doesn't want to be a selfish fuckwad and make Karkat's hesitant enjoyment all about _him_. It shouldn't be about him at all. It won't. He promises himself this.

When Karkat's long velociraptor toes curl, Dave digs the nails of his free hand in his palms to keep from palming his dick.

Then he rests it on Karkat's injured thigh, light and cautious, starts in on little circles. His other hand is busy smoothing down the hair toward Karkat's knee, and then in the other direction, it doesn't seem there's any ingrained direction but 'up' and they never stay down more than a few seconds.

With every pass his fingertips get a little closer to his crotch. He's sure Karkat can tell.

"Higher?" he asks anyway. His voice cracks.

"I. I -- mnh. Yeah. Why not."

Fuck, fuck, the tension in Karkat's voice, the badly muffled tremble. Dave's hands clench on his thighs; Karkat's toes twitch, his wings try to flare and are tightened, mantled back ruthlessly.

"You. Want to move forward a bit? Just a -- yeah, good."

He slides off the futon, shuffles on his knees, hands on Karkat's legs for what he pretends is balance, dodges spikes and claws to settle between his demon's legs. Karkat is seated at the edge of the mattress, not very high compared to a real bed but... yeah. Just. Yeah.

Dave nudges his knees apart. Moves a little closer. Drapes his forearms on Karkat's thighs, starts petting again, he doesn't want to just dive in.

Who is he kidding, yes he does. He touches a cautious knuckle to the flat of Karkat's belly, pets him there; the muscle jumps under his hand.

"Ticklish?" he asks with a little smile. Karkat growls, or makes a noise that sounds vaguely like a growl, and might actually be a groan. Maybe a choked moan.

"Fuck you, no." A deep, shaky breath. "Lower."

Fuck.

Yes.

Dave caresses his way down, finally -- _finally_ \-- follows the curve of his crotch, the mound and then farther down, between his thighs.

Something feels damp there. Dave bites his lip.

"Do you -- if you lean back on -- like, your elbows, I could."

Karkat hesitates, wings flaring open behind him, hair bristled up. His pupils are huge, his irises glow like a forge. Is he scared? No, no, Dave doesn't want that, never that.

"It's okay if you--"

" _Okay_." Karkat throws himself on his back like he's throwing a challenge, glares at the ceiling. Two seconds later he's bouncing back up on his elbows to stare at Dave, suspicious and nervous and still here, still right here with his knees on both sides of Dave's shoulders.

Dave goes back to exploring. At this rate he's going to come in his pants like a teenager, without having been touched.

There's a plate going down, he feels, one that comes down straight from the belly, over his mound like a cup.

When he presses down at the joint, between his thighs, roughly where a woman's slit would start, he feels it give under his fingers.

Karkat makes a little hitched-breathing noise that almost undoes him. Dave pauses to let himself breathe, and nudges his thighs farther apart, leans in.

He can see the gap, this close in, the interlocking plates with the weakest point like a star, almost.

It's not a vertical slit, it's almost more of a T, with the foot of the T running back between Karkat's legs, maybe to end in whatever it is he shits from. It looks almost like snake scales in there, the edges barely visible through short fuzz.

He nudges with a knuckle again, feels it give, and it's so warm in there it almost burns. He catches a flash of shockingly crimson flesh, glistening. Karkat is tense like a strung bow, spine arched, body racked with long shudders.

He spends two minutes that feel like two hours just caressing the slit, up and down, before he nudges his fingertip in.

Karkat almost catches him in the head with his knee. Dave flinches back, shocked stupid, blinks up at his demon. "Uh -- Karkat?"

He wants to ask if he's okay, if Dave hurt him; he doesn't get a chance. Dave is between him and the staircase, so instead Karkat throws himself at the balustrade and vaults over it, blind panic all over his face.

Frozen in shock, Dave listens to the impact of his clawed paws with the floor, his mad scramble for the bathroom, the slam of the door.

The lock.

Dave puts his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands and closes his eyes and tries to keep breathing. It's important.

Also tries not to get teary like a tool, because that'd be...

... He scared him. He scared Karkat. How long was he forcing himself to stay there and endure, anyway? No, no, he probably liked it at least some, he was the one who wanted -- when did that change? Why didn't Dave notice? Oh, right, he was too busy ogling his hole to care about his face, to even ask, he should have told him to keep talking, he should have -- fuck.

Doing it just for Karkat, yeah fucking right. God, he's such a disgusting bastard.

What if he hurt his leg again?

It's ridiculous how Dave is thinking he'll have to come back, his nest is here, surely he wouldn't abandon it. He'll have to come back anyway, he's bound, he can go nowhere else. Dave sits against the balustrade and pretends he's not hugging one of his knees. At least it's not both of them. He supposes. Fuck.

Latula seeps into his mind and he waits for her to speak so he can tell her to fuck off. But she doesn't speak at all, she just wraps her dragon wings all around him, cocoons him up in razor scales and banked fire, and waits for him to be ready to emerge.

\--

About a half-hour later the bathroom lock clicks again. Dave sees movement from the corner of his eye. He closes them, bows his head.

No whining, he needs to make sure Karkat is okay.

He turns toward the ladder and Karkat is already perched on the last rung, staring at him. He jumps. "Shit! When did you learn to be _quiet_?"

Karkat doesn't reply. Dave deflates.

"... Shit. I'm sorry. Are you--"

"Do it again."

"--okay _what_."

He stares at Karkat, who bites his lip once and then squares his shoulders and pads to him. He stares at Dave from underneath his bangs for a moment, and then he leans in and butts his forehead, not exactly gently.

Not in a mean way either, just a clumsy, not sure how to be gentle with you way.

[ ](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/post/42563067565/flies-into-the-sun-over-how-much-better-this)

"Ow," Dave says anyway. "No, seriously, the fuck. You want me to...?"

Karkat takes his forearm, tugs it down. He's biting his lip in concentration; Dave doesn't know why he lets him get away with it, save how baffled he feels. Karkat burrows closer to his side, pushes his pointy chin in Dave's shoulder, tugs his arm closer. Shit, is he going to try humping it? This is surreal.

"Come _on_!" Karkat growls, even as he turns his face down into Dave's shoulder so Dave can't see it. "Just -- just try it, I can't, not with my claws."

... Oh. Uh. So uh. Inside that bathroom over there, Karkat was _experimenting_. Huh.

Dave still thinks it's a bad idea, but he bends his wrist anyway, bumps his knuckles against the soft place between Karkat's thighs.

His grip on Dave's arm tightens until his claws almost pierce skin, and then he shudders and angles his hips away.

"Mnrr. No."

Dave immediately lets his hand go limp, lets it drop entirely to the floor when Karkat releases it to sit on his haunches a step away from him, elbows resting on his thighs, holding himself loosely.

It's funny, he sounded almost regretful. He's frowning, even now, looking down and away.

"Did I hurt you?" Dave asks, needs to ask. It's hard to look at him, too.

Karkat growls under his breath. "No. Yes? No. Not really, I -- just -- it was too much. I didn't -- I couldn't _think_ or anything, it was -- I didn't like it."

Dave sighs, deflates against the balustrade. "Well, I guess now I know."

"And my legs wanted to kick!" Karkat snarls with sudden frustration, "And that would have hurt you and I'm not allowed to hurt you and I could barely stop them, I was _this close_ to not being able to, what the fuck--"

Blink. "Oh. Uh. That's... normal." Also flattering. "I guess with the gear you're packing it's not as safe as it normally is."

Karkat seems to be on a rant now and won't be derailed. "Not like I even _care_ if I hurt you but I didn't _decide_ to do it! Why did it -- why -- it was going weird everywhere and I could control none of it, it was fucking horrible!"

Dave is... kind of torn. Karkat thinking it's horrible means it's not happening again. Just... nope, restaurant closed for business, no dinner to be had. But at least his issue seems to be the loss of control, not that it felt bad or gross.

Sensory overload? It'd make sense. Wow. Duh. Especially if he's never had a wet dream or played with himself as a child before the hormones really start gearing up; nope, bam! straight into an adult's body.

He has no clue what to do about it, but one thing he doesn't have the moral fortitude to do today is to bring it up again. He kind of wants to bury the whole thing in a forest and forget it's there.

Karkat is glowering at him, still. It's more embarrassed than really angry. He can't help giving him a tiny smile. Even now the brat is cute as hell. (possibly literally! Dave is a funny guy.)

"I. Hrrm. I guess I didn't mind when you touched my thighs. Just not my crotch, leave it alone. Thighs are okay." He looks away, then, chin up haughtily, and suddenly the little tidbits of expression snap together and Dave realizes that if his weird shelled skin showed his blushes Dave would behold a spectacular one right now.

Dave chokes on a surprise burst of laughter, smothers it; his shoulders keep shaking with restrained laughs anyway. "You're going to kill me one day," he says, and leans in to kiss him. At the last second he changes his target to the bridge of Karkat's nose, affection instead of expectations, though he isn't sure Karkat would even read it like that when he has no clue where his erogenous zones even are.

"Can't, not allowed," Karkat grumps, but by rote more than with actual feeling.

"Yep, kill me dead, bam, no more Dave Strider." He kisses his nose again. Mostly because he can. Karkat wrinkles it but doesn't move away. Dave figures it's permission to nuzzle him.

Karkat nuzzles his face back. Dave's heart does a funny little somersault from pure cute.

He slips his fingers in Karkat's hair, scritches. Karkat butts his head into his hand; his horn ends up nestled in Dave's palm. Dave cups it, thumb playing along its inner curve. "Do you feel anything from those?"

"No. The base -- mnh. That's not bad."

He props his chin on Dave's shoulder, eyes heavy-lidded. Dave chuckles under his breath. "We'll make a hedonist out of you yet."

It feels all weird in his chest, warm and fragile at the same time somehow. It's not what he hoped for. It's what Karkat is asking out of him, though; he can give that, so he will.

He winds an arm around Karkat's shoulders; his spines are lying almost flat, so Dave doesn't cut himself when he guides him closer. They sit against the balustrade, Karkat curled against his side, eyes closed; after a moment he drapes a leg across Dave's lap.

"... It's late," Karkat says eventually. It's getting darkish outside; Aradia informs Dave it's seven twenty-five.

"What, you wanna get to bed early?"

He's not moving off Dave, though, Dave is starting to suspect with his honed cop instincts that he actually likes cuddles (how's that for a scoop.)

Karkat lifts his chin off Dave's shoulder to purse his lips sternly at him. "Hungry."

Oh. Duh. Dave sighs, eyes his unresponsive crotch. "Wow, the rollercoaster rides you take my dick on, it's a wonder it hasn't fallen off yet."

He's a healthy young man and Karkat is already breaking him off enjoying sex. His life sucks.

"You can touch my tail," Karkat imparts, with the frown and the decisive nod of a General who's figured out exactly how to ruin his enemy's shit.

It's more adorable than sexy but Dave agrees anyway. "Well. In that case. I propose we retire to the futon, my good sir."

Karkat rolls his eyes at him. "Retire? It's one step away, you pompous douche." He demonstrates by taking exactly one step and letting himself flop face-down on the futon, though he's still off it from mid-thigh down.

Dave just admires him for a minute, stretched out on his sheets, wings loose and strong back narrowing into a trim waist, ass borderline offered.

Yeah okay especially his ass.

That's a lot of exposed thigh from the back too.

His dick is seriously getting whiplash. Wow. "Karkat? I'm gonna trust you to keep your spines the hell down, okay?" he asks. Wow, that idea. Head rush.

Karkat cranes his neck to watch him shuffle closer, an eyebrow arched, tucks a forearm under his chin to prop it up. "Hm?"

Dave hover over him, kneeling on the edge of the futon. "Do you mind if we do it like that? With you on your front, I mean. Like that."

"Huh." Karkat considers it, dubious. "With you on top of me? Hm."

"I'll move off if you tell me to."

A heavy, ' _humans are so annoying'_ sigh. "Okay."

Woohoo. "Thigh petting?"

"Granted," Karkat says, managing haughty, and then ruins it by burrowing his face between his crossed arms. Ngh. "But no crotch action!" he reminds Dave hurriedly, voice muffled. "I'll kick you and it won't even be my fault, and you'll probably fall off the mezzanine and break your fool neck. It'll be _perfect_. On second thought, maybe--"

"Shh," Dave says, and curves his hands around the back of Karkat's knees.

There's plating there, and tendons that he touches delicately, but while Karkat seems to feel them they provoke no reaction. They feel like hardened steel. He follows them until the spots where they disappear under the edge of a plate, and then to the soft fluff at the back of Karkat's thighs.

He straddles them, because he can, and when he thinks about the bladed murder weapons at Karkat's heels that he might get in the back if Karkat kicks back too far his cock twitches in interest. God, he's fucked up a bit.

(All those shell segments up Karkat's spine, all those folded-down blades like waiting butterfly knives, the spines at the wing joints and the clawed hooks at the ends...)

More than a bit.

He caresses his way up Karkat's thighs, between them some, fingertips nudging till they're caught in between, he tickles; Karkat's tail shudders, flicks like a lamb trying to get a fly off, it's so cute it kills him.

"Permission to grope your ass?"

"Is my ass now my crotch somehow," Karkat drones, annoyed, "the things I _learn_ about biology," but his face is still hidden in his arms, head bowed. Dave wants to kiss his neck, nibble on it. He's pretty sure Karkat wouldn't feel it.

"Taking that as a yes, knead it like it's dough and we're on Iron Chef."

"Shut up. Also make me dinner when we're done."

"Yes, honey."

Karkat probably _thought_ he was kidding. Dave sets his hands on a firm, muscled ass and starts kneading. Clench-release, slide a bit, clench, release, clench, thumbs rubbing, rolling, smoothing fuzz. He slides down to the back of his thighs, thumbs digging in his inner thighs, spreading them a bit. Karkat's wings are oh so slightly raised from the bed, tense, membranes quivering, his tail arches off his ass ( _presenting_ , Dave tries not to think), his spine curves to press his belly in the mattress.

He _likes_ it, it doesn't even fucking matter he doesn't want Dave to try to make him come, he's enjoying it, Dave can tell. It's -- yeah. It's good. It's more than good. It's awesome. Dave is feeling pretty awesome, too.

So is his Stridernator. Woo.

He massages his way back up, to the top of Karkat's ass, the armored base of his spine, digs his thumbs in at the edge of the plate; Karkat groans quietly. Wow. Okay. Massages work. Too bad he has so little exposed muscle.

Dave nudges the underside of Karkat's tail with his thumb; it twitches.

It's so soft underneath.

He needs it on his dick. Like. Right now. His other hand fumbles with his fly; he shuffles higher up astride Karkat's thighs as he fishes himself out, pumps his length a couple of times to alleviate the need some, and leans in.

Fuck. That fuzz on his dick. Karkat's little tail arches up, hesitantly curls back down, covers the tip of his cock, shit, yes. He parts Karkat's ass cheeks, nestles his dick in between. Oh yeah. Yeah.

"If you put that in me," Karkat growls, but he seems more nervous than threatening. Dave pulls himself away from trying to burn the image in his memory, looks up. He can only see one of Karkat's smaller upper eyes; it's watching him, all tiny and anxious.

Dave curls a hand around his armored hip, rubs it soothingly. "I give you my word," he says quietly, "I will never do that without your express consent."

Consent is an iffy term with bound demons, though. Dave frowns to himself.

"By which I mean you have to want it in, seriously, you _not_ me. I mean ideally I'll also want to but we don't even know if it'd fit, anyway--"

"Oh sweet holy douchewhiff, I got you the first time, go back to rubbing your gamete ovipositor tube on my glutes and shut up!"

Dave bursts out laughing. "Ow, fuck, we said no more rollercoaster for my poor balls, stop making me laugh."

His dick is not that much softer than it was a minute ago, which is to say he might well be able to find employ as a diamond mine drill if the cop thing doesn't work out.

Karkat growls, impatient. Dave rolls his hips.

Ffffuck yes.

Karkat's ass cheeks clench a little on him; surprise, probably. It's so good. Dave plants his hands on the mattress on both sides of his hips and rolls them again, finding and trying to keep a slow, easy rhythm.

Takes him about a minute of watching his cockhead disappear and reappear under Karkat's tail and he's spreading his knees to brace, leaning more of his weight on them. He thrusts harder, feeling millions of silky bristles rubbing him, hard muscles holding onto him, fuck.

His belly traps Karkat's tail under him; he feels the dull edge of spines against his skin. If Karkat flicked them Dave would be spilling his entrails in a hot second. The spike of adrenaline that dashes up his spine only makes his pleasure stronger, his senses wider open, his body more alive.

He fumbles a hand up Karkat's back, feeling the way the wing attaches with shaking fingers, the delicate interlocked plates and tendons, gorgeously alien.

Touching the membranes, light as he can, makes Karkat flap them and give a full-body clenching twitch that has Dave groaning and desperately trying to breathe. He does it again.

"Ghh-- stop, you son of a fuck -- shit!"

Huh? Dave forces himself to slow down, blinks. "Whuh -- does it hurt?"

"No, but if you fucking do it again I can't guarantee your organs are going to stay in, okay?"

Karkat wriggles under him. It feels like the hardest thing he's ever done to sit back (oh no his baby cannon is all cold now) and lift himself up to let his demon flip on his side, curled up a bit and glaring defensively, spines flicked half-up. Karkat is breathing a little fast, and Dave's lust-addled brain reads it as arousal. His fingers itch to do it again.

"Are you sure I can't--"

"Stop making my body _do_ things!" Karkat snarls back. He rolls on his back, and then he's winding his arms around Dave's neck and pulling him down on top of him, which Dave realizes pretty fast he is pretty okay with.

He nuzzles at Karkat's neck, nibbles a sloppy line along his jaw, his cock pressed between their two bellies. He loves Karkat's arms heavy around his neck, the demon's breathing in his ear, a bit unsteady still.

"There -- do it, hurry up."

Dave is thrusting against his belly, and it's nice with the pressure and the soft bits and all but not as good as a firm hold. "Trying!"

"I can feel it," Karkat growls in his ear; Dave shudders. "You're close, just -- what do you need?"

Dave's mind is blank. After a long, embarrassing moment he manages to gasp, "Claws, down my back -- light, don't blood -- bleed, don't do that but _ah fuck yes_." He kisses Karkat's face, sloppy and blind, feeling the lines his claws raise on his skin.

Karkat nips at his chin, his lips when Dave finds his mouth, Dave presses their lips together, tongue exploring rows of sharp teeth, the warm softness of Karkat's own tongue. Karkat is a little furnace under him, he can't get enough of that.

He fumbles for one of Karkat's hands, lifts himself up -- argh, cold, cold, no -- places Karkat's hand between them, so his dick comes to nestle in Karkat's palm. He can feel the edges of Karkat's knuckles dig into his soft belly, his palm is unyielding -- so warm, though. He checks quickly that his weight isn't going to push Karkat's claws inside his own belly, and leans on him again.

It almost hurts. It's perfect. He kisses Karkat again, a little off-center at first; Karkat bites and makes a strange growl-chirp noise and scratches his back again.

Dave thrusts in the hard tunnel of his hand and imagine that soft, wet place, so vulnerable instead, and comes so hard he actually legit sees stars.

Okay, just weird black-light stuff on his clenched shut eyelids, but. Wow. Fuck. He goes limp on Karkat, gets nipped; oh right. it's the hardest thing ever to lift himself just enough to let Karkat take his hand back, and then he's flopping down on him again, nuzzling at his neck, and he will deny to the end of days that pleased little moan he makes there.

Karkat's other arm is still draped around his shoulders. Mm. Yes. Nice.

"Fuck you, you squirted baby glue all over my hand again."

Dave snickers. Maybe he shouldn't have, because a second later Karkat is thoroughly wiping his hand on Dave's back. Urgh. Dave wrinkles his nose and moves not an inch. It'll wash off.

A sigh. Karkat doesn't wriggle under him to make it the most uncomfortable afterglow ever, though. He might even -- oh. Oh, he's sliding his claws up Dave's spine, to the base of his skull, where he scritches the way Dave scritches him. Oh.

"Mmh, yeah..."

It's all light and ticklish, the knifepoint of his claws can't put any more pressure in without slicing in, but it's nice anyway. The physical feeling, and the gesture itself.

"Is it really that good?" Karkat asks, quiet and serious. Dave cracks an eye open and lets his head roll back a bit so he can see his face.

"I sense that you already know petting is nice, so, uh... Sex?"

Karkat looks away, but pushes his question out anyway. "Orgasms. It looks -- it doesn't look like it, your face twists like it hurts and your whole body seizes up, and then there's your heart exceeding all fucking speed regulations, it sounds like something you should go to a healer for."

Dave tries not to laugh, but the best he can do is to make it a soft chuckle instead of anything more explosive. "It's fucking awesome. Some orgasms are better and some are so-so, but even the so-so ones are pretty nice, usually. Occasionally you'll get one that peters out sadly and you're left with a cramp in your arm wondering why you did all that hard work for this result, but it's not the most common."

He drops a kiss on Karkat's chin, just because it's here.

"You just gotta remember, your control comes back pretty fast. It's better to do it on a bed, though. Less accidents. I'm so not gonna want you coming up against the shower wall, wow, that'd be a royal mess. Bet we'd fall through the glass."

He lies, he does want it very much. But, restaurant still closed for business. It's okay, Dave has awesome sandwiches.

"Wow, sex standing up, that sounds like the most risky bit of stupid ever. Slippery floors, too. How does anyone ever top that."

"Sex in a running car? Sex in an airplane? Open window?"

Karkat fixes him with a flat, incredulous stare. "What. No. No one can be that idiotic. I refuse it."

Dave lets himself slip off him, regretfully, though he keeps an arm around his chest. "Remind me to show you the Darwin Awards website."

Oh hey if he stretches his arm a bit he can get at Karkat's other wing from across his chest.

He only figures out he's made his own award attempt a second after he's started trailing light, light fingers on the membrane. Bam! demonsplosion.

"What the fuck! _No!_ Don't _ever_ , shit!" Karkat is snarling, backed up in his nest corner and bristling all over the place, incandescent with rage.

His wings are not an erogenous zone, his wings are a _kill_ zone.

Dave sits up. "Holy _wow_ are you ticklish. That's about a Defcon Three, I'd say."

He narrows his eyes thoughtfully. Tilts his head.

Wriggles his fingers.

" _I will kill you in the face._ "

\--

**karkats physical yays cont.**

**13\. marshmallows (confirmed best/worst idea i ever got)**  
 **14\. dim sum (confirmed but maybe only a three or four on the scale of yay)**  
 **15\. thigh pettins (confirmed woohoo)**  
 **16\. ass massages 8D**  
 **17\. not sex (sob)**  
 **18\. wing pettins NO. HOW DO YOU TAKE THINGS OFF A LIST. NO. ALSO, NO.**  
 **19\. your typing says no but your sweet sweet wings say yes**  
 **20\. BITING MY SUMMONER. I LIKE THAT. ALLOW ME IT.**  
 **21\. enduring privations**  
 **22\. SLEEPING ON THE COUCH.**  
 **23. ~~wing pettins~~ there happy YES, THANK THE FUCK OUT OF YOU.**  
 **24\. BEING FED ON TIME. HINT**.  
 **25\. yes sir**  
 **26\. ALSO, DELETING STUPID SHIT.**  
 **27\. owning his own phone to put his own claws through the keys YES, OKAY, YOU MAY ATTEMPT THAT.**  
 **28\. ruining me THAT ONE IS ALSO EXACT.**  
 **29. ~~being way too damn cute for his own good~~ BITING YOU. IN THE FACE.**  
 **30\. *~ BEING FED ON TIME.~***  
 **31\. haha okay <3**


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heads up for a bit of gore.

**_ POLICE DETECTIVE CONSORTING WITH DEMONS IN THE FLESH! _ **

"Jade wasn't kidding about the headline, wow," Dave says as he drops the newspaper on the passenger's seat. "PR is going to bitch forever about it."

"I don't see why," grunts the lump under the bed sheet in the passenger's side foot well. "The only thing wrong about it is that they imply I'd ever share you."

Dave snorts. That'd almost sound romantic, if you amputated the whole 'life support/food source' context first. The light turns green; he starts the car again, and Karkat makes a displeased clicking noise; after a few seconds, the newspaper disappears under the sheet. Paper rustles.

"Believe me, they're still going to shit bricks. What's the article say? Read it to me, bud."

Dave knows Karkat is annoyed about it, because he says "Yes, _Master_ ," snidely before he does. "If I had told the readership a week ago that the police of this city would summon and bind a corporeal demon, I doubt any of you would have believed me. Yet, here I am, claiming that the Detective-Summoner David L. Strider has done just that. You weren't even alone and the Seer and the Witch did most of the job, what the fuck."

"Wow, how about you switch your voice a little when you read and when you editorialize, so I can tell 'em apart. It's weird as hell otherwise."

"Denied. You told me to read it to you, you didn't tell me not to add shit in."

Pff. "Okay, fine. Go ahead. Creatively sprinkle the words shit and fuck like they're awkwardly placed punctuation. It'll probably be funnier like that, anyway."

"Hmph." The sheety lump shifts around a little; Karkat straightens up so an awning in the cloth lets some more light in, not that it should be very dark under there. "Summoned and bound six days ago, the demon has been out on work leave for the last three. I'd like to see you handling three demons in your three _first ever_ days and then not wanting a little vacation, you two-faced ink-guzzling gossipmonger."

"No kidding," Dave agrees, voice as bland as he can make it to hide the smile, and merges into the next lane. Traffic is okay in the middle of the afternoon, but he still has to pay attention.

"Ah, _good_ \-- understandable, one supposes _I'm going to suppose my fist in your snide moue_ , as its first day on patrol with Detective-Summoner D.L. Strider -- not to be confused with Detective-Summoner D.B. Strider, his elder brother who the jolly diddly tapdance even cares -- saw them facing off with two stray embodied demons, one Class One and one Class Two, to the detriment of a thankfully vacant primary school. It wasn't vacant, you biased, bigoted pile of whine, the demon lived in it. And thank you so much for your lukewarm approval of things we did in the name of stopping your sorry carcass being put to better uses, I know I'll sleep better tonight."

Dave starts wondering if perhaps he shouldn't have tried to record it. Karkat seems in fine, snarky form today. The enthusiasm from getting to see Erisol apparently went at it hardcore with the stress from being in a car and now he's breathing out vitriol fumes and gnashing sparks out of his teeth. He sounds like he's ready to have a grand old time eating the face off the first asshole to give him an excuse.

"Its second day on the job was the memorable Bank of America Class Three-powered attack by the well-known criminal group calling itself the Midnight Crew, where Detective-Summoner Strider directed it to duel the embodied Class Three blahblahblah. You directed exactly jack, I had to order you to order me to do the sensible thing. In the resulting brawl, which unfortunately injured several bystanders -- it did? do cops count as bystanders? -- and caused a great deal of property damage, Detective-Summoner Strider's new partner managed to capture the rogue Class Three, but failed to otherwise aid in the attempted capture of the leader of the criminal organization. I'm not sure if he's trying to say I was clumsy or if I deliberately messed up my orders. I would have wrecked the whole building if I could, you moronic douchewad, I think I'm more insulted at the insinuation of incompetence."

"There, there, I'm sure you wouldn't have stopped at barely half the building," Dave says soothingly, and deliberately does not mention that weird thing with Spades Slick. He didn't order Karkat to capture him beforehand and could not order him afterwards because _gun aimed at his face_ ; hencefuckingforth Karkat did not capture him, end of story. "Is there anything that isn't purely telling us shit we already know in the most doubtful way?"

"Mnh." Pages ruffle. "Huh, they interviewed your neighbors."

"Seriously?" Alas, Dave is parking. He just spotted the perfect spot and he'll be damned if he lets anyone thieve it from him. He slides the car in smooth as a dream. (He's sure Karkat is merely kidding around when he grips the edges of the seat to hold himself steady. Yep.) "Leave it here, we'll finish reading it later."

He gets out of the car, goes around to open Karkat's door.

He knows Karkat already hates him for what he's doing now, but they've talked about it, and yes, the doubled length of thin rope he's sliding in his little leather necklace is still non-negotiable.

"It's not like it would even hold you," he mutters under his breath as he kneels on the pavement and loops the ends of the rope through the string, around his shield. "That's barely a string you got around your neck, the rope's twice as big, it'd break in a hot second if you tripped and put your weight on it, it's--"

Purely symbolic. Yeah. That's probably what Karkat objects to.

The demon doesn't say anything, just watches him with burning eyes. Dave has a duty to the civilians not to frighten them into cardiac arrest, and this time they won't be hurried in through a discreet backdoor and kept away from public areas. With a sigh, he straightens and winds the ends of the rope around his wrist once and then into his palm, in a hold that looks solid and would mostly get him rope burn and a nice handhold on thin air after that.

He picks up the get-well card he left on the dashboard and nudges Karkat away from the door, closes and locks it. "C'mon. We're just dropping in and out, and then we go straight to see Erisol. No lead in the police station."

He makes sure to walk as cop-ishly as possible as he walks through the hospital doors. Karkat minces his steps at his heel, awkward like a grasshopper forced to keep it to a sedate walk, staring ahead with his head held high as he can.

Wow is it quiet in this lobby. You could hear an old dude in a walker drop. Whoops. Thank fuck for trained nurse reflexes that catch the old man before he can faceplant on the tiles; Dave pretends he didn't notice and makes his way to the help desk.

"Hello, Detective Strider." He shows her his ID. "I'm looking for Officer Heuang's room."

"That. Uh."

Karkat ruffles his wings boredly and gazes around the waiting area.

"You uhh. Can't have animals in here. You can't."

Welp. Nervous stammering, fixed stare at the demon she can't see over the edge of her high desk but too paralyzed to step back... welp. "Hm? He's a service animal." He gives the scared stiff receptionist his best charming smile, since he's never been good at reassuring ones. "Room number, please?"

"It's -- it's. It's just that."

"You can have security escort me to her room, if that'd make it better. Karkat's a big pussycat, the worst he'd do is cuss in your grandma's earshot."

"Is that the -- the demon who saved her?" another receptionist asks. She's also looking nervous, craning her neck to look over the desk. Karkat glowers back at her, sulky.

"Yeah. Her partner thought she'd want to meet him. I kind of assumed he'd think to warn you guys, though."

"Um. Maybe he did?" the second girl says. "And, uh, you know, different shift, lost the note... um. Okay, follow me, I'll let you onto the staff elevator."

Woo, a way out. He'll take it. Dave and Karkat follow her, Dave doing his best to look casual as possible. Behind them the waiting room revives in hurried whispers.

The girl is nervous and keeps glancing at Karkat, but oddly excited too. Her hand keeps twitching toward one of her pockets. Dave does not like that much. And maybe she was a little _too_ helpful? He makes sure to keep them both at her back when she guides them to the elevator. He almost regrets leaving his gun at home -- but it'd be a pain in the ass and he's a summoner, he's _never_ unarmed.

"I was thinking, I'd come up with you, help you find the room -- it's number 309, by the way -- people might feel better about, about staff?"

If she was carrying a gun the metal detector they just went through would have caught it... right?

"Umm. Can I take a picture?" she asks with a huge, nervous grin, and -- oh, smartphone. Hah. Woo, professional paranoia.

He gives her a tiny smile back, shrugs. "I dunno. Karkat, do you mind if she takes a picture of you?"

"Wow, funny how you think it's worth asking when it's other people wanting to invade my privacy, but you don't even bother when it's you."

"Dude, you don't understand, the world _needs_ to see your bed hair. It's too epic, has to be seen to be believed." He looks up at the receptionist. "Honest, I kind of think it looks like Photoshop even after having seen it in real life."

She snickers, though she looks a bit off-balance. Why no one expects Karkat to be a grumpy little bastard and to let the world know it, Dave isn't sure. At least the second time she looks straight at Karkat. "So... Can I take your picture? Please? You, um, we saw the hold-up on TV, well, some footage anyway, and you were really awesome, my brother will _freak_ when I tell him I met you."

Karkat blinks, caught flatfooted. "Ah -- uh. Oh."

Blink, blink. Oh lord he is so cute. _Why_. Is it some kind of lure for stupid food-to-be? It sure is working like that on Dave.

"Um. I don't get why, but okay. You can even put it on the internet, I guess, it isn't like that humongous asshole hasn't already spammed his fucking watch list to hell and back."

Ngh _Karkat being shy_. Dave bites on his lip to keep from pulling out his phone and taking a picture of his own. The girl takes the time to center the shot, grinning. Behind her, an orderly walking by freezes like a deer in headlights and then forces himself to keep walking while staring ahead like he's trying to make himself blind.

Click. "Thank you! Wow, that's so cool."

She leads them down a corridor, and another; "That way you'll be right next door to Officer Heuang's door when you come out!" she assures them, so hey.

Karkat makes sure to keep Dave between the two of them, and keeps throwing her startled covert looks.

Only a couple of steps before the elevator the lead goes tense in Dave's hand, and he finds Karkat has stopped in his tracks, is staring down another corridor with his eyes a little vague and his head tilted.

"Karkat?"

"-- Nothing. Lots of free-floating energy that way."

The receptionist has a finger on the call button. "The morgue?" she asks without thinking, and then she swallows nervously. Dave doesn't like how Karkat twitches seeing it.

Blargh. She's a civilian, and not a summoner at that. She's still doing pretty well, considering.

Some demons are psychopomps -- feed on everything freed by death. Aradia is, he thinks, at least partly, and Damara definitely is. Creepy as fuck, but it makes sense in some primal way, the way blood and sex do. "Anything you want?" Dave asks, casual as possible.

Wings rustling, back spines chattering, Karkat shudders. "No." And he walks in the elevator first, yanking on Dave's hand. Dave follows before the necklace can break.

After that it takes them barely thirty seconds to be at the right door. Dave waves a goodbye at the receptionist, knocks, shepherds Karkat in.

"Hey, Heuang. Looking good," he deadpans.

Officer Heuang's forehead is sutured, she has a black eye in five colors (all of them butt-ugly) that takes up half her face, a bandaged cheekbone, a fat lip even three days later, her neck's in a brace and she's got one arm in a sling and one leg pointing up in a suspended cast.

When she grins the splits in her lip threaten to reopen. "Liar, my hair ain't even done up."

"You're ravishing anyway," he assures her very seriously. She's already stopped paying attention to him, staring down at thigh level, and he's pretty sure she's not eyeing his crotch cannon. "So. This is Karkat Vantas. Karkat, this is Officer Heuang."

"Hi," he grumbles reluctantly. "You wanted to talk to me, good, talk and then we can go, I hate this place and I have to wear a fucking leash and--"

Dave works his fingers in Karkat's hair, around the base of his horn; he rubs. Karkat's defensive grumpiness sputters to a stop.

"... Mnnrr."

"Hi, Karkat."

Heuang holds out her hand over the edge of the bed. Dave's demon stares at it.

It's not even like it's the first time someone tried to shake his hand. With John, he threatened to tear it off and wouldn't even touch it.

He reaches extra-cautiously for hers and bumps their palms together lightly, thick claws held back like he's afraid of how much damage he'll cause if he tries to hold it. Heuang wraps her fingers around his palm, squeezes lightly, and shakes.

"Thank you. I'm told you didn't even do it on order?"

Karkat bristles all over, yanks his hand free, but his eyes dart looking for an escape route; he bumps into Dave's legs stepping back. "Oh, fuck you, fuck everyone, of course it was on orders, he said I had to protect the--"

"I don't even care if it was," she interrupts, "because I have three cats and you can't even imagine how devastated they would be if their can opener disappeared from their lives. So, thank you."

Karkat bristles and takes another step back. "Ngh! No, stop it, you don't _thank_ people for doing what they w-- what they did for reasons of their own without even asking you! I didn't set a price for you, the asshole's paying your tab, it's fine, stop being so weird!"

Heuang gives a rough chuckle and relaxes back on her bed. "You don't take thanks or compliments well, huh."

"You have _no idea_ ," Dave replies, with feeling. "I dunno what problem demons have with freebies but it gives them hives. Unless they're too busy going _hahaha you sucker_ , but I guess you can't eat verbal acknowledgement."

"Well, I'm not in a great state to pay my own tab right now, but later maybe I--"

"Nope, vetoed." Dave doesn't even have to think about it; Karkat is starting to look actually uncomfortable instead of flustered, better to put a stop to it now. "Anyway I sent in the paperwork and stuff and soon he'll have his own badge number. So, you know, it's bad form to keep track of that sort of stuff between colleagues. Yep."

Karkat growls at him, but at least it seems to be more out of irritation than out of squirm-inducing embarrassment, and it's such a familiar state by now he probably finds it comfortable.

"I don't believe this shit. What in the vast reaches of this abhorrent universe made you think I'd even fucking _want_ it?"

It makes Dave feel vaguely rejected, for two seconds, and then Latula snickers in his mind. Dave quirks a smile. "Do you not want it, then?"

Karkat glares at him, and lets out a glass-rattling, low-throated growl.

"Hmm?"

" _Shut up_. It's getting late and you promised Erisol, move your fat, nasty ass already."

Heuang starts giggling. "--Ow, ow, my lip, ow. Oh Lord. Okay, I like you."

Karkat turns his glowing-eyed glare on her. "Next time I'm dragging you by the _feet_ , you're so close to the point where a little more brain trauma would actually be a fucking improvement -- _stop laughing!_ "

Dave is pretty sure the second her partner drops by Heuang is going to share the breaking news that out of all demons ever Karkat wins the bashful crown hands down. And then no doubt the dude's going to share the scoop.

He's pretty cool with it. Pretty sure it'll only get Karkat more flustered, though. Better not to overload him today or he'll dig in his heels and throw an 'I am SO fearsome and fuck you!' tantrum the next time it happens.

"Okay, let's get you to your playdate, buddy." He nods at Heuang, mock-formal. "Officer Heuang."

"Detective Strider," she replies in kind, lips pursed very seriously, and then, "Knight Vantas."

Karkat twitches a little, gives her a startled, weirdly intense look.

"Thanks for visiting."

"Get well soon," Dave says, flicking the card on her stomach, and he leads his demon out.

\--

He parks underground because it'll be closer and less busy than crossing through the police station lobby; he has a feeling Karkat is peopled out right now, he hasn't even picked up the newspaper again or even said a single word to Dave. He just hopped in the car, lifted his chin to let him take the rope leash off, and curled up.

"We're here, buddy." He opens Karkat's door. Karkat hops out, shudders absently, gathers his wings close. Dave leads him out.

The room they're keeping the Class Three in is actually the firing range. Which does not make a lot of people happy, but it's only until tonight; they can reschedule. Dave knocks and walks in.

"Hey!" Jake says, and waves at them. "You gentlemen are early!"

He's sitting at the scoring table near the door, so it's only a few steps to say hi. Karkat doesn't come with him; he slips between the shooting booths and onto the range without asking. He's still in eyesight -- can't be anything else, apart from sigils on the walls and floor the shooting range is entirely bare on that side of the line -- so Dave lets it go.

The ceiling is low, making the place claustrophobic. There's only six lanes, so the room's proportions are strange. Sound carries weird. Dave doesn't enjoy the range much, when he's not busy shooting things in it.

The Class Three is so far down the range that the long coils of its body almost seem small.

"Yeah," Dave answers, a beat late, and turns to look at Jake, "we stopped by the hospital to visit. Officer Heuang wanted to meet Karkat."

Jake grins over the lid of his laptop. "Aha. Her dashing knight in chitin armor?" Dave snorts at him. "I saw she endorsed him quite firmly in that last article."

"Hm?"

Jake hands him the copy of the newspaper he was half sitting on. it's warm from his butt, awesome. Dave flips it open. The article is pretty boring without Karkat's commentary. Blahblah interviews with -- "The fuck, they really did interview my neighbors. Oh, that old goat, I haven't even _seen_ him since I brought Karkat home -- _what_ terrifying screams, that's my usual music, fuck you, and if you can hear Karkat rant then get your ear off my keyhole, seriously!"

"Haha."

Dave purses his mouth at Jake over the newspaper for not taking this with all due seriousness.

A glance at the other end of the range shows him Erisol still coiled, sitting up, and Karkat sitting on his haunches in front of him, head a little tilted. He wonders what they're talking about -- he wonders _really hard_ \-- but they're not fighting, so he goes back to his article.

"Also apparently Karkat is the size of a bull, barely under control, and has threatened to eat the soul of some unnamed asshole I detect is miss Lannigan's precious cherub, I'm pretty sure Karkat only ever mentioned his flesh..."

"Aw, shucks, did he really threaten a child? PR won't be happy."

"It's not like he _meant_ it," Dave mutters.

Jake chuckles at him, and checks the time. "Will you look at that!" he exclaims, and pushes away from the table. "Time to feed Erisol his afternoon snack."

Dave stares at him. Jake is bent over rummaging in his backpack and doesn't notice.

"Uh."

"Yes, old chap?"

"Want us to come back in a half hour or what?" Dave asks, a little strangled. Shit, but this place is public, for all that most personnel has been encouraged to wander elsewhere for the duration.

Jake emerges from his backpack with a bowl in one hand and a jar of honey in the other. "Come again?"

"...Uh. Never mind." Wow, um, what a fascinating article. Yes.

"If you say so!" Jake piles up a box of cereals and a thermos on the table. "Erisol! Hungry?"

"Is that a trick question?" the demon answers with its weird dual voices after a few seconds, and heaves itself out of the knot it tied itself into to slither to their end of the range. Karkat paces it. "No, wait, you're too dumb for tricks. Hand over the honey an' no one gets hurt."

Laughing, Jake drowns a bowlful of cereal in warm milk, adds a big spoonful of honey over it. "Sure thing, my friend!"

"I'm not your friend," Erisol mutters from both mouths, but in a discouraged way that tells Dave it's had every single attempt at hostility bounce off the English Oblivious Field and is just about to give up entirely.

Erisol doesn't come through the booths, since the seal pattern follows them; Jake goes up to it and hands it the bowl and a soup spoon. A little spoon would seem more appropriate to Dave but what does he know, maybe Erisol's still having a hard time handling shit and it'd be too hard with a smaller handle. Eh.

Karkat is eyeing the other demon's meal, speculative; Erisol hisses quietly and coils itself around its bowl, glaring at Karkat with resentful resignation.

"Karkat, you're forbidden from stealing Erisol's food," Dave says absently, and opens the newspaper again. "The size it is, it needs a snack more than you do."

Karkat draws himself up, offended. "I only wanted a taste!"

"Dude, stealing food could well start a fight. You're not dying of starvation, so it's not a survival issue. And we're in a building full of people. Vetoed with the power of a thousand suns."

Okay, now the demons are giving each other a puzzled look. Huh.

"They wouldn't start a fight, I'm one class over them and I beat them already."

"Whoa there, starting to sound like bullying."

"It's not -- It would only be a _taste!_ I wouldn't even starve them! You keep saying I'd be _stealing_ , what the fuck."

This time it's Jake Dave exchanges a puzzled look with. Oh, demons.

"Its food, not _your_ food, take its food when it doesn't give you the food, wow, look at that! That sure is some definition for thieving. Where are my handcuffs, we got a criminal on our hands."

"You humans are _really_ weird," Erisol comments, and almost chokes on the huge gulp of honeyed milk it hurriedly guzzles down.

"I _beat_ them! I could drink their fucking _blood_ if I felt like it. Argh." Karkat sends a frustrated look at the rapidly disappearing contents of Erisol's bowl.

"But didn't you beat him on Dave's orders?" Jake comments. "So therefore doesn't it make it so that _Dave_ beat him, merely using you as the weapon?"

Karkat sputters. Erisol brightens a little on one face, though the other one stays dour.

From up close its chest has the look of the bombed fuzz of a bee thorax, though at least there's no stripes.

"I hope you choke on your own saliva and die," Karkat tells Jake, with feeling.

Dave nods agreeably and reopens his magazine. "Alternately, you could ask Jake if he's got any honey to spare."

"... I hope _you_ choke on _burning soup_ and it goes down the wrong hole and _then_ you die."

Dave remembers how much Karkat enjoyed aspirating soup when it happened to him, and gives him a sadly disappointed moue.

"Ahaha! Oh, phew," Jake goes, wiping his eyes free of hopefully metaphorical tears of mirth. "I could certainly do that, sir Knight, I bought four pots and I'm pretty sure not even Erisol's prodigious appetite will manage to polish them all before tonight."

Only now Karkat hesitates, staring at the other demon, who's looking woeful and martyred with both faces, shoulders and tail tip and weirdly creased wings drooping.

Karkat heaves out a loud sigh, and then goes to bump his armored shoulder into the other demon's side, still twice as high from the ground and about four times his weight, most of it in tail. "Okay, fine, you big baby, I won't eat your honey. My word on it."

Erisol relaxes a little and bumps back cautiously. Karkat sits on his haunches, tugs it down by the arm with a little fussy pout, and starts grooming its left head with his claws. Huge faceted eyes blink in confusion. Dave kind of wants to do the same. The heck just happened. Karkat sounds all... patient. And nice.

Dave didn't even know he could sound nice. Embarrassed to be caught not being a snarly insult-master, yes, cuddly yes, but just ... friendly and nice? That's really unexpected.

Then again. Why would Karkat be nice to him. Or around him. Yeah.

Wow, Dave just managed to depress himself. He sits on the table, pulls out his cell phone, and starts trying to beat his high score at Angry Birds.

\--

"No but seriously, they interviewed my _neighbors_ , why not me? We were home pretty much all the time, they could have, you know, _knocked_."

Jade laughs at him over her shoulder as she reaches the next landing. Only another floor before the roof. "They could have knocked!" she agrees brightly, waiting for Dave and Karkat to catch up a little. Girl has springs for legs, for serious. "At the _door with a corporeal demon behind it_."

Dave goes "D'oh," rolls his eyes. Even if they hadn't been scared, anyway, he knows they were hoping to find quotes about the out of control danger or the disappearing pets or maybe a sex scandal or two (gotta see about masking that keyhole -- just kidding, his key is flat.) Dave was unlikely to give them that.

At his heels, Karkat makes a thoughtful little noise. "... They'd _definitely_ not have a key," he muses, a bit too interested.

"Oookay," goes Dave, "we gotta review the definition of 'home intrusion' and also how you're supposed to _capture_ intruders, not chew on them."

Karkat grumbles. "I _know_. It's just not as fun to think about."

Jade giggles. "Wishful thinking, huh? Dave's letting you get bored."

Karkat grumbles up at her, too. "I wouldn't _kill_ them, anyway."

Dave deadpans, "Oh, good." Karkat sneaks him a side look.

"Once they're dead, they stop bleeding."

Dave is pretty sure this is revenge for having to stay in Dave's line of sight, which meant he couldn't take the stairs with Erisol and had to stop cuddling it and scritching its hair the same way Dave scritches his -- the same way _he_ scritched _Dave's_ yesterday -- for five fucking minutes.

He's not sure if Karkat sees his face and thinks it means the joke went too far, or if he wants to look good for Jade, who still makes him nervous, but his demon relents. "Okay, fine, also because they can't be punished appropriately for trespassing once they're dead."

"That is so much better. I am so relieved. Feel the relief pouring off me."

"Nah, that's just your normal stifling stink."

"You guys should become comedians. You know, if the whole cop thing doesn't pan out."

Dave pouts at Jade, who's on the top landing, holding the metal door open for them. "What's with you guys and making me look for another job? First Dirk, now you... Gonna give a guy a complex."

"Ooh, maybe you should be a war photographer!" Jade says as Karkat cautiously minces his way across the iron-laced threshold.

Dave totally wanted to be a war photographer when he was six, but then he found out World War Two was over and was inconsolable until he figured out he wanted to be a fireman-rapper instead. But by then they're on the roof; he gets a bit distracted from the banter by the way his demon stalks ahead, now that the limited visibility of the staircase isn't forcing him to heel.

"Karkat, stay outside the circle," Jane orders calmly before he can cross into the pattern the other demon stands in. "And... Now."

The circle today has three points, already occupied -- one for Jake, one for Jane and one for, of all people, Captain Egbert. It's not like a Class Three needs three Class Four-rated summoners, really, unless they wanted to be extra-cautious... Hm.

"I thought he was Space," he says to Jade, watching as the summoners stand there and nothing interesting happens. (At least in the visible spectrum. The hair on his arms is starting to prickle up. To watch, though, it's boring as hell.)

"Cap'?" she replies, absent. Her eyes are half-closed and her skin glows a tiny little bit. Dave wonders idly if it's Porrim or Kanaya she's using to feel the weaving power better. "Oh, yeah, it's not ideal, I suppose, but at least Maid inverts to Page. It'll stabilize Jane a little to have another Maid around, I think."

For as long as he's known him, Dave doesn't think he's ever seen the man summon. Tonight will be a first.

No, wait, they're unsummoning anyway.

"Have they started yet?" Rose asks, as she steps through the door Dirk is holding open for her. She sounds a little out of breath. Dave gives both of them a minimalist wave.

"Naw," Jade replies for him, "they're just setting the wards."

"Tell your demon to step back, his aura might contaminate it."

Dave wants to frown at Dirk -- for bothering Karkat? for making Dave talk to Karkat? something in between -- but his brother is right, he supposes. "Karkat? C'mon, step back."

The two demons are staring at each other like they're on two sides of a prison gate and the blinds are about to slam closed over the bars oh no Jerry when you get out of the slammer I will be old and saggy and gray sob sob.

He feels like an asshole getting annoyed at the way they bonded when, really... they're both demons and he's not, he enslaved Karkat and is not, in fact, his friend, and -- oh, yeah -- the dude might well _die_. The risk is low enough with all the calculations and revisions Dirk and Rose and Jade have done, but still, it exists.

Reluctantly, Karkat comes back to his side, head low, chewing on his lip and throwing little worried glances back. Dave hesitates to pet him as he wants to. Might be comforting, but might not; he's not sure Karkat really wants to be nudged into paying attention to his _master_ of all people right now.

Dirk and Rose both have notebooks and pens out, since this close to a summoning any tablet might fry. Jade is still squinting seriously at the proceedings. Meanwhile Dave can't see jack shit... Oh. Hey. It's starting.

Jake's and Jane's short hair is starting to move around in creepy seaweed-in-riptide ways, harsh and choppy. Expected for Eridan, but Feferi is usually classified as lively, not as incoming storm. The back of Captain Egbert's bare neck and his hands throw a weak, steadily growing glow around him, deepening his shadow; he just stands there with his back to the group, breathing in and out, perfectly controlled.

Jane starts tracing runes in the air. Dave can read maybe half of them, and they don't make much sense. Bluh. Ritual magic is so... bluh. Pretty to look at, he supposes, but he'd ruin his camera trying to take a picture of it.

And _here_ are the shadow tentacles weaving nets behind Jane, and here are the wet rainbow scales...

... wait.

"What the -- that's not Feferi!" he whispers hurriedly at Rose, who is closest. She snorts at him, not looking away. "Feferi doesn't make your skin _gray_."

"No. It's a Thief of Life," Rose whispers back. "Her name's Meenah."

The first he notices of Karkat's reaction is when a clawed hand closes on his belt from behind and hauls him a couple of steps back.

"--Whoa!" He almost falls on his ass, manages to catch himself against the wall. Karkat is crouching before him, wings spread, hissing softly. All his spines are up. "Karkat, what the--"

"Hss. That's not far enough. It's never really far enough with her, okay, I like her but fuck's sake she does not understand why overkill is a bad thing."

"If you're the one telling me that," Dave starts, but Dirk throws them a pointed glare.

"Be _quiet_."

Dave is quiet. Jane really doesn't need to lose control now. Welp.

Demons of Life are pretty rare, and Class Fours even more so. There must be a reason why instead of calling this one Jade and Jane and that Life-aligned firefighter, what's his name, have been trading Feferi amongst themselves.

Especially with a title like that. Okay. Um. Maybe not so weird.

Jake orders Erisol to be still; it goes straight-up rigid. Must be terrified. Shit.

Jake doesn't order Erisol to be quiet, so they can hear the low, long whine rising in a spiral of hundreds of vibrating insect wings, the -- oh, shit, the pained little yelps that screech out like nails scrambling up a chalkboard.

"You didn't tell us it would hurt!" Karkat accuses, bristling and furious all over.

"Told Erisol," Dirk replies laconically. "Dave, make him calm his shouty tits already."

Karkat snarls, moves as if to pounce on Dirk; Dave knows he can't, won't, but he grabs his shoulder anyway, hauls him closer. He crouches, an arm wrapped around Karkat from behind. Karkat's spines have been pressed flat, all tight, and Karkat is not happy about it, his whole body tense.

Captain's glow's been brightening as he recites his part of the spell; now right through his white, pressed shirt Dave sees a strange dark mark on his back. Jake is still reading his own clauses and orders off a list. Erisol is still whimpering.

Dave presses his cheek against Karkat's from behind and doesn't bother trying to soothe him. Erisol still isn't moving, even though with the sounds it makes you'd expect it to be tying itself into a knot or writhing around or _something_.

It all goes in its voice. It's horrible.

For a moment they're all done speaking and nothing happens at all, _nothing_. Jane nods at Jake, reluctant. Jake gets out a knife and bleeds himself in the circle, splatters a few drops on the green demon. Dave doesn't need to _see_ magic to feel the shockwave of it rattling through his bones.

Erisol comes apart.

The skin splits and curls back and the bee fuzz falls and oh lord, oh jesus fucking _wept_ , it comes apart at the seams like its flesh is suddenly putty and there's boulders inside, only what stretches and holes it in the end is the demon's fucking _organs_.

Dave is on his feet, Karkat in his arms, feet off the ground, because if Karkat throws himself in that he will get a backlash in the face and die too.

Dave is on his feet and he wants to run up to it too and there's nothing, fucking nothing he can do, oh lord, here comes the blood, so much of it, delayed like for a moment it forgot it was supposed to flow. Karkat whines and goes all dead weight in his arms.

He feels the point of a few spines digging in his stomach, but it's not breaking the skin yet; he ignores it. Fuck. _Fuck_.

The tentacle mirages and the Captain's light wink out; spell's over. A pile of meat and guts lays still in the circle. (Thank _god_ it's still.)

"Jake," Dirk says, entirely calm in the middle of all that dead (haha dead) silence. "Summon them."

"--Uh?"

Dave is just as baffled as Jake. They who?

"Erisol. Summon them. They should still be close enough."

\--Oh, right, wasn't Karkat using 'they' too? Funny, Dave never asked Erisol what it -- what they wanted as a pronoun. 'It' was easier or something.

Does Dirk really believe...? He's pretending not to be but he's tense, too, Dave knows Dirk's smallest tells and his brother's back is stiff, his weight all on his toes, he's not half as sure as he sounds.

Jake's startled laugh is the signal for Dave remembering that he's holding up a demon and the demon is heavy as fuck, and he flops down into a crouch; Karkat yelps, lands on all fours. Dave lets him go.

"Erisol says it's charmed but no thanks!" Jake announces with a delighted grin. "Alright, no, it's saying it ruder than that, oh, no, wait, don't leave yet -- aw, it's gone."

"But it worked," Jane says. Everyone pretends not to see anything weird in it when Captain Egbert wraps an arm around her back in a tight hug to keep her on her feet and she rests her head on her uncle's shoulder. She's pale, sweaty, but smiling too. Dirk hands her a sports drink in silence, nodding his approval.

"It worked, but _really_ not the way we thought it would work," Jade says, grimacing as she takes in the royal mess. Dave takes the time to admire it too, now he knows Erisol isn't trapped in there. Holy shit on a popsicle, there must he a draft horse's worth of cartilage and torn muscle and offal in the circle. The puddle of blood is steadily growing, already touching the edge on a couple of points.

"They're a _demon_ ," Karkat grits out, pretending angry to hide the way he still shakes. "Also known as _nonphysical entity_. What did you think the flesh part would _do_? It's not like it can come through with them!"

Rose eyes Dave's demon speculatively. "Actually, I heard a story once about humans who walked through the hell gate..."

Karkat spears her with a 'you're retarded' look. " _And did they come back out_."

Dave isn't sure about her expression then, hesitant, mysterious. She shrugs. "...Well. Maybe."

"Huh?" Dave prompts her, walking up to her, but she merely smiles at him in a way that presages nothing good.

"Dave! Dearest, favorite brother. Dirk and I must note down our observations before we forget the details, and the summoners are tired. What do you think should be done with the... remains?"

Dave sees it coming big as a house. He makes any suggestion at all, he'll be advised to implement it himself. Damn it. "No idea. Karkat?"

"Put honey on it and eat it."

The worst is he looks entirely serious. Dave and Rose splutter and start laughing. "Nooo! Oh fuck, no, forbidden, verboten, vetoed _no_. That's gross as fuck!"

"Why? They just left it, it's not decaying yet."

"Because it contained a sentient being?" Rose points out. Karkat keeps blinking dubiously at her.

"Doesn't anymore, though."

Dave had better end this before it turns into a spirited from-midnight-to-dawn debate. "You can have one honey pot if you agree not to eat Erisol's earthly fucking remains. I don't care the dude's literally in a better place now, shit's still gross."

Karkat huffs, but his eyes are a little bright with the promise of finally getting his hands on some honey, guilt-free. Dave decides Karkat feels better. He steps away from the group and gets his phone out, now that the magic is gone from the air, calls a guy from the city who knows him so well he calls him by first name when he picks up.

" _Hiya, Dave! Lemme guess, another demon to pick up. Where at?_ "

"Police station roof," Dave replies blandly, and enjoys the splutters. The guys are really well paid, considering the risk of magical contamination and the sometimes dangerous areas they have to go to in order to pick up the carcasses. "You might want to bring the wet'n'messy gear."

" _Beet puree again?_ "

"Maybe not _that_ bad. But the access sucks. You get one set of nicely narrow stairs before the elevator."

" _Aw, man. We better get a bonus._ "

"Luis, you asshole, you already earn more than I do."

" _I'm worth it, though. Get yourself a demon that eats flesh, maybe!_ "

Dave could totally order Damara to decay the body until nothing was left but dry bones and dust. But then they would have dead demon dust floating all over the city from here. Yeah, nope, no biohazard incident for him. Plus he's sure she wouldn't smother the smells from every second of the process, either.

"Bleh. Oh, don't forget a bone saw. Thing's big as a horse. A horse and a Shetland pony."

" _Okay, dude. Put a tarp on it, we'll be there at six tomorrow morning. And stop calling me at home, you dick!_ "

"Teach you not to invite me to see the match with you, babe."

" _I am never, ever, ever going to watch any sports with you ever fucking again, Strider, not even if that sport is_ _curling_ _._ "

Luis lies, Dave is a very good sports spectator. Okay, no, Dave lies. Sports are stupid and he's got enough on the brain remembering demon rules, he's not gonna care about tennis and ice hockey as well. When he ends his call the others are finishing up too; he rejoins them, just in time for the conclusion.

"So we are agreed the delay in Erisol's release from their flesh was caused mostly by the fact that Jake was not their original summoner?" Rose asks.

Jade and Jane nod, thoughtful. Jake probably gets the theory even less than Dave does. (So long as you know what works, you don't really need to know _why_ , though, so whatever.)

By delay of course they mean the little bit of torture porn there at the end. Hm.

"So there's a way to fix the whole, you know, hideous pain thing?" he asks. He's not sure he wants to know the answer. (He does want to know. What if one day he has to -- what if he can't stand to keep -- what if Karkat asks him to let him go.)

Rose nods at him. "Most likely. The process will always be painful, but it shouldn't be that bad with a proper bond. At least that is what the theory suggests, and what Kankri is pretty certain of, for mysterious reasons of his own."

She pauses, and Dave almost says he's got to get a tarp, but the expression on her face makes him stay. Muted excitement, eyes bright.

"And as I have received approval from the City this afternoon, and as Kankri himself has received all the reassurances he still needed..."

Karkat goes stiff. "... No. Oh no."

"He has given me his agreement to be incarnated next."

Dave's twin grins, a small, bright one. Dave's demon hisses like a bathtub full of vipers and rattlesnakes.

"No! Fuck you, no, I refuse!"

Rose grins down at Karkat, eyes gone red and wet. "He's greatly looking forward to it."


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for dubconny stuff.

"You're _bleeding_ " is the first thing Karkat says to Jade of his own volition, and it sounds a bit like an accusation.

Dave's partner pauses in the middle of pulling herself out of the backseat. (Karkat is too used to his hidey hole beside Dave to change spots without a fight, and he's been tense around Jade enough as it is.) Dave leans in to frown at her.

"You manage to hurt yourself before we even get on scene, Harley? Are you going after Egbert's crown of oopses or what?"

Jade is looking puzzled, mostly. She pulls herself out of the car and blinks down at Dave's demon. "What are you talking about?" she asks, or starts to ask.

Then she notices where Karkat is staring at about the same time Dave does.

"Oh shit, not today!" Jade groans. Dave turns away, not at all hurriedly. Who was looking at his partner's cooch here? Surely not a gentleman like Dave Lalonde Strider.

He doesn't mention that Jade's mood isn't any worse than usual. He made that comment once, a couple of years ago, and then he was karateed at, sat on, and made to read biology texts out loud and explain to Jade why expecting something called a _pre_ menstrual syndrome to affect her _during_ her menses was a peculiarly stupid kind of stereotype. She'd finished the lecture with a long, terrifyingly friendly rant about how the only thing that pissed her off about her period was that it'd ruined so many panties, she'd had to give up on silk and lace and her soul had never recovered.

Dave's soul has never recovered from that talk either. Fair's fair.

" _You're bleeding_ ," Karkat repeats like she doesn't get the problem. His claws skreek on the sidewalk; he stares with as much offense as if she'd done it especially to spite him. Dave nudges him with his knee.

Jade pouts at the demon, cheeks puffing up. The brown of her skin is relatively dark, so it's a bit of a surprise that Dave can see her blushing so neatly today. "Yeah, well, it's just the beginning, I don't care. Let's go."

... Ew. Dave does not want to visualize. No. No.

"Uh, don't you want to, you know. Take care of it."

"I'll do it when we're back at the station, Dave, for fuck's sake, where do you want me to get depantsed and put in a tampon here?"

Jade waves her hand at their surroundings. Dave looks. They're... not in the best area of town, kinda skirting a little close to the badlands, so the street isn't clean and there's scribbles on paint-cracked walls, but then again his own apartment isn't in a much better area.

There's also a severe dearth of public bathrooms, and a few too many passersby for the car to be a realistic option. Yeah, okay.

Also the guys at the scene are starting to stare at them weird, like why the fuck are those assholes wasting their time chatting it up over there. "I surrender," he says, and follows when she starts ahead.

Karkat nudges him hard in the thigh, hisses not as quietly as he probably thinks (or he doesn't care, that's also a possibility.) "But she's _bleeding_ from the _crotch_ , what the hell, is there a taboo on mentioning stupid injuries from reckless copulation attempts or what?"

Jade rolls her eyes and flicks a little gold-tipped horn. Karkat twitches. "I'm on my period, poophead. My uterus is shedding all that nice fleshy nesting material it didn't use for the baby I didn't make this month."

Karkat blinks, startled. "--Oh. Right. I know about that."

"And if you mention it around other people I am going to kick you in the knee. It's pretty personal, okay? Pretend you didn't notice or something."

Karkat shifts to put Dave between him and her, stealing wary, sulking looks. His nostrils keep flaring. "I'll pretend I'm not noticing it when it stops waving its slutty aura in my face! Do you have any idea how much power is in those _three fucking drops_? Okay, the magic feels weird as fuck, but--"

"Karkat? If you ask her if you can have her period blood I am going to crumble into the gutter and cry, I'm warning you."

Karkat sputters up at him. "I'm not asking her for anything! But what's wrong with period blood? It's not like she's using it anymore--"

"What a great day for a murder!" Jade shouts over his voice, and stalks to the officers keeping the perimeter with a wide, toothy grin. "Hi! Detective-Summoner Harley, and those are my partner Detective-Summoner Strider and his... Karkat. Who's got the scene?"

A senior officer turns to them and waves them in. Dave and Jade sign themselves in on the scene attendance sheet and walk up to him. Jade has seen him around on the range, turns out; introductions are short.

"We've got tire marks here, a victim chased over this," he says, pointing at a traffic barrier, "falling to her death in the park underneath. Come on."

The buildings stop, a dingy little park thing caught between blocks weaves and bumps its miniature hills there, no doubt from after construction left piles of loose earth grow grass and a couple of half-hearted trees. Seems like a dealer paradise. (Also a kid paradise, if one wants not to be cynical, but. Cop.) There's a well-traveled walking path going off the street and down.

When Jade and Dave stand at the start of it, they can see the body underneath, surrounded by uniformed cops. They've put up a tarp between it and the side of the road, though, even though it hides jack shit from eventual passersby, which is a bit weird. The forensics dudes aren't here yet.

When they start down they see one of the women officers crouching by a cement sewer drain, half-hidden by crushed grass.

"And then we've got the witness. Called it in on his cell phone and then went right back in his hidey hole, hasn't come out since."

Shit.

There is no way in hell Dave can fit in the drain. It's dubious whether _Jade_ could, even scrunching herself tiny as possible. And the expression on the officers' faces...

"It's a kid, isn't it," Dave says.

"Mnh. He's fucking terrified, to the point he's barely coherent at times. Still responsive, sort of, but if this goes on much longer we're gonna have to break a wider hole."

No wonder they put up a tarp. The victim's broken neck is nicely gruesome.

Dave sucks at soothing victims, so he takes a step toward the body.

_Wait up, firetruck._

Karkat is circling the scene, squinting right and left suspiciously; he's not a great sensor by any means but he still goes looking, Dave isn't sure what he thinks he might find. Jade is stepping toward the woman officer by the drain.

_Switch it up._

_You sure?_ he asks. Latula sounds unusually serious.

_Do you trust me?_

_How you can even ask that question, babe, I don't know._ He starts going after Jade. "Hey, pardner, switch it up? Hunch-like things happening in here," he adds, tapping a finger to his temple. "None of 'em mine, mind, but."

Jade's brow furrows in puzzlement, but she waves him ahead and goes to take a look at the body.

"Hey there," Dave says quietly, and crouches by the sewer drain. He exchanges a nod with the officer; she looks tired, traits drawn. "What'd you get from him?"

"His name's Colin and he's eleven. He wouldn't tell me his family name." She leans in, whispers, "He seemed afraid someone'd track down his mom if he told. Severe paranoia."

"Huh." _Latula, suggestions?_

_Maybe. Call up crabzor._

Dave scans the scene for his demon, waves at him. Karkat reluctantly starts to join them. _Now what?_

_Iunno, I'm no seer. I just..._

So now Latula sounds... unsure. Of something regarding her abilities. What the hell is going on.

Karkat joins them, following the wall so he won't be seen from inside the tube, good plan. Dave nods at him, and then goes flat on his stomach to peer in, chin propped on his crossed arms on the lip of the drain. "Hey, Colin. I'm Detective Strider. You still in here, or does that thing actually go to Narnia?"

No response. Karkat hisses at him, "What did you want?"

"Idek," Dave says, and doesn't even get much entertainment out of watching the officer twitch at his real-life use of netspeak. "Kid? And that grouchy dude who doesn't talk real quiet is... you might have seen him on TV. Did you watch the bank attack the other day? Pretty wild, huh?"

Dave has seen some footage yesterday. Funny how it's more impressive from far away than in the middle of it. Then again he had no time to stand around being impressed back then.

"... Yeah," comes from the dark depths of the drain.

 _Keep going,_ Latula says. She's not even in the kid's brain, so what does she know about what will work? But Dave does trust her, so he does. "The one with the big green snake dude and the tiny armored jump-happy dude? Did your mom let you watch that?"

"Yeah. It was on the news."

"Going around throwing ridiculous eye lasers and kamehamehas and stuff like that, yeah? It was pretty crazy."

A faint, rusty chuckle. The kid's been crying.

God, he hopes he's not gonna scare the kid into never coming back out again. "Anyway, the grouchy dude beside me is tiny armored jumpy dude. He's my partner-bro. I'm telling you 'cause I don't want you to be startled or anything when you come out. He'll be an official police officer sometime this week, when we get his badge in the mail. He's kind of scary-looking, I guess, but he's cool."

Karkat makes a vaguely offended face, then apparently decides that being scary-looking is a good thing and fluffs his wings.

"He was really badass against that criminal green dude, wasn't he?"

Karkat preens a little. "Damn straight I was." And then he peers in past the edge before Dave has thought to stop him. "Hey. What are you even scared of? It's gone."

Shit, shit -- Dave waits for a scream of terror; he just hears a hitched breath, which might be even worse.

"And I'd be fucking glad if it came back, I could eat its fucking face and we'd be done here and I could have dinner."

The officer groans. Dave purses his lips. So long as he cuts Karkat off at the pass before he mentions what dinner will consist of he can still spin this. "Well. Ain't like a kid his age isn't going to know those words, amirite? No need to tell your mom my demon drops F-bombs like he's a bomber plane."

Silence. _Latula, grrl?_

"He'd really eat it?" the kid asks, all quiet.

"Well, maybe not, but he'd definitely wreck it, and probably the asshole summoner who goes around with it too if it's got one."

The kid doesn't answer straight away. Karkat grumbles. "Stop smearing your skinned knees all over the walls and come out already."

Great, the kid's bleeding, too. "Wow. Colin? If we send you cleaning stuff and band-aids for your knees --"

"It'll eat my mom if I come out. It'll eat me and then my mom and my cousins and my uncle and grandma and everyone. It'll follow me. It'll follow me and -- and -- g-get into my skin -- and know _everything I_ \--"

Shit.

The worst is, the kid might not be imagining it.

"Colin," Dave says, dead serious now. "Did the demon touch you?"

"N-no, no, it didn't see me, I didn't see it, I -- she fell and I hid, and I -- I could hear it, skrr skrr skrr and I -- and it was -- everything was wrong and--"

"You got good instincts," Latula says through Dave's mouth. "Gonna summon yourself some righteous badasses when you're all grown, aren't'cha." She grins; Dave can't tell if the kid even sees it. It feels kind of wrong, as always, for his mouth to stretch that much. "If it didn't get its gross hands on you and it didn't scope you with its beady little eyes then it couldn't tag you. It can't find you now. So chill, yeah?"

"No -- that's--"

Karkat huffs. "She's a Knight of Mind, stupid, she knows that shit."

"Um. She? I -- I thought you were a guy?"

"I'm a guy," Dave replies with a little snort. "That's my main demon lady. Her name's Latula. I let her take rides in my head sometimes, she's funny. It's not like being attacked, though, we got rules for that shit and since it's my skull, welp! It's my rules. I think she likes it here, for whatever reason."

The kid makes a doubtful little noise. Karkat snorts. "Okay, bored now, can I go and check for things that will have long since disappeared by now or what."

Dave would let him -- if he's bitching at the kid he's not going to help, and he glares at Karkat a little over his shades for it -- but Latula stops him.

"Crabzor -- stay."

They turn back to the drain.

"I'm a Knight of Mind, kiddo." She's all... calm, measured, not laughing, not awkward. Not big-sisterly. Serious. Steady. "Knight means I protect, and Mind, I think you can figure out on your own."

A wet little half-laugh answers her.

"Come out now," she says, quiet and sure. Dave sits back on his haunches, waits for her cue. Beside him Karkat and the woman officer are waiting, too, looking to _him_ for cues. Like he knows what Latula's up to.

He trusts her anyway.

Even when she's flying blind.

The kid crawls to the edge of the drain, and stops there, still a little way in. In arm's reach, though. Dave nods. "Hey, Colin."

 _Touch him now,_ Latula says. He can feel how.

He leans in, slow enough he won't startle the kid and not so slow the kid will dodge, cups his temples in his palms, fingers following the curve of his skull. _What now?_

Scaly coils and immense wings shiver through him, curl. His skin goes patterned with dragon scales. And then -- and then.

"Karkat," says Latula, "Knight of Blood," and she -- taps -- something inside Dave, somewhere deep and... oh. Huh.

It wells up inside him, through him -- through Dave-and-Latula, then through Latula. Lava -- nothing explosive, but burning-hot, and it flows around Latula's armor and around the, the _ruins_ , half-crumbled and black and still impassable, lava and blood in castle moats and just you try getting through now.

Dave blinks himself free. To the naked eye nothing shows but a faint, clashing red and silver-sage glow haloing Colin's head. Inside himself he can still feel Latula coiled around the point in his soul where Karkat is bonded to him, even as she loosens her grip and draws back.

Karkat is staring back at him, eyes a little wide, still too stunned to react. Shit, how bad is it going to be, when he finally does?

_Did you just use his **name** on him?! Like, through me? Double fucking reach around?_

_Hehe. Nah, only what I heard in normal conversation 'n stuff. He didn't give it to **me**._ A pause. _Dang, it worked._

He'd demand answers, only the kid is still there in the drain, staring at them with his mouth hanging. He's a scrappy little thing -- dark, puffy eyes and a mess of spiderweb-spangled curls -- and his hands and knees are still bleeding sluggishly.

"You wanna come out now, champ?"

"Yeah, sure," the kid answers, and then tilts his head. "Wow, I feel all calm now."

Dave snorts, and shuffles to the side to let him crawl out and the officer move in. He still seems a little dazed, confused, but not really scared anymore.

An EMT moves in, crouches beside them, sits the kid down on dry, dead grass, and starts poking and prodding and cleaning and doing her thing. Dave props his elbows on his knees.

"So. Apparently my girl Latula decided to give you an anti-mindfuck magic helmet or I don't even know what. How's it feel?"

"Way calm. Wow. But not like, sleepy or anything."

The EMT and the officer frown at him. Dave shrugs.

"What it did," well, what he _thinks_ it did, but he knows better than to add that, "is to cut you off that other demon's terror field. There were probably little bits of the thing stuck to you like spider web, and it couldn't hold you but it kept sticking anyway, you get me?" The kid nods. Dave adds, more for the EMT than for him, "I think you'll soon be able to feel your own feelings again, but since you also feel that there ain't no getting through that armor, there won't be a reason to panic. It can't track you down, and now even if you met it again it couldn't get in and grab you. 'kay?"

"Mnh. 'kay."

"So what's your mom's name, Colin?" the officer asks, so Dave gets back up and dusts himself off.

Success! One not-scared-anymore kid, delivered to you by your chef, Dave Strider, and his lovely assistants Karkat and Latula, esqs. Okay, more the other way around. Entirely the other way around.

"I'm gonna..." He gestures vaguely at the tarp, waves goodbye, and walks off nonchalant as possible. He's not really feeling it.

Wow. Well.

_I did not know you could do that. Why did I not know you could do that._

_'cause I can't, duh._

Dave glances behind him. Karkat is on his heels, a look on his face that spells slow boil. Welp. _Sure looked like it to me!_

_Chillax, bro. I ain't lying to you. I can't. **I** can't._

She can't. Dave throws another look behind him, a more baffled one. Karkat is frowning at nothing in particular, eyes unfocused. _Karkat can? He's not Mind._

_No duh, that bit was all my mad skills._

_So then what did he do?_

Latula laughs. _I think if I spill he's gonna find some way to dig in your head meat to get at me, homeslice. You're too rad a ride for me to lose you in such a totally lamesauce way, you dig?_

"Bluh."

"Bluh, he says," Karkat replies acidly from behind.

They've walked a bit away from the body, out of easy earshot; Dave stops by the police tape at the edge of the scene and looks down at his demon. "So."

"Ask Latula what the fuck she thought she was doing," Karkat growls. Dave isn't sure how seriously he should take the anger.

"She says she's pretty sure you don't actually want her to answer," Dave replies, hands in his pockets, an eyebrow up. "But I, personally, would pretty much love having one. Just saying. To the both of you."

Karkat's expression goes thunderous, but he doesn't answer, back rounding and spines rattling up defensively.

It's the 'you'll have to use my Name' face. Dave sighs.

"Okay, fine. But I'm gonna tell Rose."

Karkat growls and turns away to groom his wings, pointedly dismissive.

Dave wriggles his fingertips on the most ticklish part of his wing membranes as revenge, and then he saunters back to Jade, now that Karkat is outraged at him for better reasons.

\--

"No, I'm serious, Karkat, giving my period blood _symbolically_ to my demons is one thing, but having you physically lick it up with your _real_ tongue -- just, _no_."

Of course neither Jade nor Karkat get the concept of indoor voice. Of course Jade has to keep pushing her point even as she opens the door to the Demon Crimes room.

Of course Dave is pretending he is not with them. It's failing so far. Boo.

"If you see a difference at all then how the fuck are you _meaning_ the symbol?" Karkat returns, glaring heavily. Dave supposes vaguely that it's better than him still being tense and quiet around Jade. Maybe. In most occasions but this one, at least.

"Mean it? Easily, when I don't have to watch them slurp up my uterus clots!"

There are some things in life Dave was never meant to picture. _Hey grrl, need a restock on amnesia on aisle seven._

_Hahaha, nope._

_Bluh. You're not my favorite anymore._

Several people snicker, amongst them Rose. Karkat's head swivels to stare at her and he abandons Jade and Dave to stalk up to her. They're left to blink at each other and watch him stalk off from behind. Admittedly it's a pretty nice sight.

" _You_. We need to talk."

Dirk, who was sitting at Rose's desk, starts shuffling files. "Suddenly I have this burning need to be elsewhere."

Dave deadpans, "Take me with you." Karkat, startled, breaks his staring war with Rose to look at him.

"Hey, no, I need to talk to her!"

Damn it, he looks all alarmed. Also, cute. Blargh. Dave gives in, slinking closer with his shoulders hunched, which makes Jade laugh and punch him in the shoulder blade. "Okay -- ow -- but if you ask Rose about her period blood I'm ordering you to be silent until dinner. I am not kidding."

Karkat snorts disdainfully at him.

"Welp. Watch as he manages to have a full conversation talking around it in ways that manage to be worse somehow." Dirk gets up, mouth pinched like he does when he doesn't want to smile. "I'm... going to go and do a thing. Over. In my cubicle."

"Woe. Abandoned. You are not my brother anymore."

"Technically I'm your cousin."

"Technically you are a traitor and fuck you, you know what I meant and also I'm telling on you to Bro."

"You guys have the _weirdest_ family," Jade comments, which is pretty much the routine comment when this kind of weirdness comes up. "Just saying."

"If you're going to be noisy tools, can you do it farther away? I'm trying to have a conversation here," Karkat growls at them. Dave and Dirk blink back solemnly. Karkat huffs and turns away like he thinks they've actually given in. "And by conversation," he tells Rose, "I mean I need to talk and you need to shut up and listen."

  
Rose's lips curl up in a slow, amused smirk. She gives a nod, eyes hooded, mouth pointedly closed.

"... Good." Karkat was visibly not expecting that. He falters for a second. Dave waits, curious to see if he'll broach the topic of what happened at the crime scene on his own, or... "Okay. Uh. You need to not summon Kankri. Just about anyone but Kankri would be awesome, actually."

... Figures.

"You're, uh, what... Seer and... Light? Okay, the choices in high level Seers are limited around here, there's Terezi but she's kind of insane, and I guess a Seer of Void would be fucking useless to you, yay I see nothing in the nothingness, awesome."

He pauses, expectant. Rose keeps saying nothing. Dave and Dirk lean against the nearest bits of walls and watch. Jade rolls her eyes and sneaks off to fill some paperwork.

"She's a pain but for a Seer Terezi would be pretty active in ruining people's shit, I guess, I can see her taking a really proactive approach to fucking with people's heads, so she could do double duty. Kankri would be a useless fuck, he's just going to sit on his ass and predict shit, yeah, awesome, yawn, he might as well stay in your head. Or you could go with Light? Maybe a Knight of Light, that'd be badass, is there any around?"

"Dude, if there was I'd have them on my roster," Dave replies, since Rose is still keeping her lips pursed. "I'd have nabbed that shit so fast, wow."

"Prince of Light? Mage? I know a Sylph, she's annoying but..."

"Aranea?" Dirk says. "She's got her. What would a sylph do in the material world, though, considering they're pretty much embodiments of their aspect? That'd risk making the incarnation unstable."

Karkat grumbles. "Well, who else do you contract with?"

Rose arches an eyebrow.

"Yes, yes, you can talk now."

"Well, there's Vriska--"

"No. _No_."

Rose chuckles. "Who would prove rather high maintenance on the mortal plane, yes, I agree. And I've had a few contacts with a Bard and a Page of Light in the past, but both proved too unreliable to keep in touch with. I doubt this would improve with incarnate summoning."

"Argh." Karkat scratches at the bridge of his nose, eyebrows furrowed in very serious thought. "Seer of Light, Seer of Light... I guess if you found a Mage of Void, that'd be workable? Or a Mage of Heart or Doom, in a pinch. Come to think of it, a Mage of Doom would probably work pretty nicely. Void's only good for stealth."

"That's got nothing to do with you being buddies with Sollux, huh," Dave drawls. It's mildly impressive how invested he is in convincing them not to summon Kankri though.

Karkat harrumphs. "He's got interesting powers, okay? He could fuck up a lot of shit. I'm sure she'd like that." He sneaks a look at Rose, who nods sadly.

"I would indeed enjoy it, I think. I haven't had a truly active role on the job for a while now. Actually, I was planning to incarnate Sollux before Dave decided he absolutely had to venture down that path first."

Karkat makes a series of hard to decipher faces, most of them frowny and displeased, but he shakes his head in the end. "Well, there you have it. Get Sollux. He'll be way more useful, plus his voice will make you want to kill yourself about fifty percent less."

Rose makes a 'not really convinced' face. Dave knows it's mostly to wind Karkat up. It's working. He's looking almost desperate to convince now.

"Because Kankri is really going to be useless! He doesn't _fight_. He _lectures_. What more would he do out here than in your head?"

"Serve as a power reservoir," Rose says. Karkat's jaw clicks closed, and he glares. His lip curls up, baring fangs.

"Do combo spells," Dave says. Dirk and Rose's heads snap to look at him. Karkat has gone stiff all over and won't turn to do the same, pointedly turning his face away. Dave almost feels sorry.

He steps into Rose's cubicle and sits on the chair Dirk vacated earlier, and he looks at his demon, tense and unhappy.

He's got his loyalties, though.

"Latula pulled a new trick on me. There was this kid -- witness, caught in some kind of terror field, or maybe just the edges of it, and she kind of... warded his brain." He pauses, and then he repeats, for clarity, even though he knows they're both more than smart enough to have caught all the implications already. "Someone else's brain."

Karkat is staring at him with burning eyes. Dave keeps looking back as he finishes.

"By tapping into Karkat's abilities somehow."

"Mother of _fuck_ ," Dirk says, slow like each syllable needs vetted for accuracy first. " _Combination magic_."

Karkat's claw-hands curl into fists, and he looks away. Dave wishes he knew what he's protecting so fiercely. What he thinks will happen if they learn what Blood can do.

"Has that ever been recorded?"

"Apart from ancient tomes that are more legend than fact and dubious experimentation with double-riding? Which doesn't even truly produce a new spell, anyway, unless we count the brain death cases as not being accidental."

Dear lord, they're both positively _sparkling_. Dirk turns to Dave, an eyebrow up. "Hey, Latula, could you do it again? Say, on me."

"No can do," she answers through Dave's mouth. "You ain't in need of protection, bro."

Rose slaps her forehead lightly. "Of course. Knights. Engineering a test will be complicated. But we can already suppose that it's the Blood aspect that acts like a conduit. It allowed Dave to tap into Karkat's reserves of energy, and then it allowed Latula to connect... Good Lord, I really hope the ability won't only show in active classes, but even if it does there should be some fascinating inversions in a Seer..."

Karkat turns away, stiff, like he was about to stomp off and caught himself. He wants to leave, Dave can see it in every single line of his body. He can't without leaving Dave's field of vision, though, so in effect he can't at all.

"Can I have your period blood," Karkat snaps suddenly, without warning. The way he holds himself, he doesn't mean it even a little bit.

Dave promised to order him mute if he brought it up. He's counting on that.

"My apologies," Rose replies, of course, entirely steady, "Kankri has dibs on that." Which is something Dave was so happy not to know, and wow now he's wondering if the method of intake will change once he's incarnate _oh dear lord_ _his brain_.

He closes his eyes and massages the bridge of his nose, and he fulfills the promise he made his demon. "Karkat. Be silent until dinner. That's an order."

Karkat stares back at him, jaw tight, angry and satisfied.

"I'm gonna help Jade with the report before she kills me with her brain. See you guys later." He gets up and walks away, Karkat on his heels.

\--

He gets tired of Karkat being a ghost pretty fast. Even in his nest under Dave's desk Karkat is always good for a comment here and there, for a complaint that he needs a bathroom break or that Dave's feet stink.

For a random 'hey my chin is on your knee, how'd that happen? not a clue but now that it is you better get scritching, asshole,' too.

No petting today.

He misses it.

The only reason he doesn't rescind his order is that Karkat was the one who wanted it given, and he'd be angry and distant even longer if Dave did that. He'd probably keep silent of his own will, even.

He finishes his work at six thirty, detours by the bathroom. Karkat makes no move toward the stalls, even though he's got to be uncomfortable by now. They have a staring contest for a few seconds and then Karkat looks away, not like he's conceding but like he has lost interest. Dave orders him to go piss.

The car provokes no reaction either, no change of expression. Just that same flat, bored glare.

Dave wonders if he'd grimace at all if Dave put the leash on him. Dave wonders what the fuck he's thinking.

They get home. Dave doesn't want to bribe his demon to like him again, so he doesn't order sushi. (He orders smoked salmon and fresh cream pizza. Not a bribe at all.)

Karkat doesn't need to be ordered to eat, at least (unless Dave's casual 'come on, food time' counts,) but when he's licking his fingers clean he's still silent.

The order should have lifted on its own. Dave says "The order to stay quiet is lifted" anyway, just in case. Surprise, (not,) he gets no answer, not even in body language.

Usually after eating Karkat retreats to his hidey hole upstairs; he hisses if Dave doesn't stay downstairs to watch TV for a little while at least before going up.

He rocks back on his heels. Dave is lunging across the coffee table before he's thought twice; he catches an upper arm.

He doesn't know what to do with it. Now he's bent precariously over the table and his back is twisted, it aches; he can't make himself release him.

He knows what he wants to do with it. He -- knows, he knows, he -- shit.

He tugs Karkat closer, around the table. Gently, but not letting go. Karkat keeps staring holes into his head. At least he's not ignoring him.

"Hey. Uh." He wets his dry lips, starts again, quieter. "You haven't had your other dinner. I bet--" --that thing with Latula taxed him, no, he won't make it sound like he's only thinking of Karkat's wellbeing, so fucking selfless isn't he.

He cups his cheek as lightly as possible, leans in to press their foreheads together. Karkat doesn't blink.

"If you're not hungry for that," he says, all rough; his throat is a bit tight. "You have permission to push me off and leave for upstairs. Or -- or if you'd rather stay hungry, I guess."

He releases his arm.

Karkat doesn't press his cheek into his hand, doesn't turn to get Dave's fingers under his chin in a good scratching position; he doesn't leave, either, so there's that. (Maybe he's that hungry.)

Dave guides him up to straddle his lap, nuzzles his cheek. He wants to kiss him but even at the best of times he feels like Karkat only indulges him when he kisses back, that he doesn't like it much. He kisses his neck instead, the interlocked rings of armor that no doubt let no sensation this light through.

He presses his face in the hollow of his shoulder and wraps his arms around Karkat's back and hugs him. It's killing him how silent Karkat is, how doll-like, but ordering him to speak would be worse.

"You can leave," he repeats in his neck, eyes closed. No reaction.

His hands find the roots of Karkat's wings, the edge where the membranes join with the bone structure. He tries not to go so soft it tickles.

He keeps at it until Karkat starts breathing deeper. He thinks. Still no noise. He goes down his spine, pressing into flesh when he encounters it, over his ass, around the root of his tail.

It's. Not very sexy. More relaxing than sexy. He starts rubbing his hands on the outside curves of his ass, warm and firm.

Fuck. Nothing works. It's not even working for him. What if he --

He guides Karkat down against the arm of the couch, kneels between his legs. His demon's eyes are still open. He's watching him. No expression. Dave dives under his chin, nuzzles there. Kisses his throat, kisses a path down his chest, Karkat's not feeling it, maybe a faint sense of pressure and that's it. Dave kneads the inside of his thighs, guides them open, knees up. He kisses that fuzzy belly, nuzzles it -- is Karkat breathing deeper now? He listens to him breathe, waiting for the moment it crosses over into a gasp.

He kisses down into the hollow where Karkat's thigh meets his belly, under the armored jut of a hipbone, fingers kneading and petting the inside of his thighs still, Karkat liked that the other day, and the days afterwards, he did.

He kisses his mound and what if he put his mouth down there, in the soft place between his legs, he could be careful and slow so Karkat doesn't freak out, so he likes it, so he feels good, that'd be awesome. Maybe he'd talk to Dave again.

He can't.

He can't.

He kneels up between Karkat's legs, lets go, moves back against the other arm of the couch.

Fuck.

"Okay," he says in the silence (his throat hurts.) "Okay. Sorry. I can't." He extricates himself, stands between the table and the couch. "I'm getting a knife, be right back."

It's been a while since he bled himself. A week? Maybe less, but he's feeling fine now. It'll be okay.

He turns to leave and there's something pulling his wrist back. Oh.

Karkat is frowning up at him.

Dave blinks a couple of times, fast, stares at the window off to the side. The blinds aren't drawn. Whoops. Who cares, there's no direct line of sight into his apartment. He should close them anyway on his way to the -- the. Kitchen, and the knife, yes, he should do that. He will, soon as that hand-shaped shackle releases him. Yeah.

"I -- can't feed you, Karkat. Not today. Not like that. Blood's okay though, right? I'm -- not gonna let you starve, it's cool. It's cool."

"Your face is wet," Karkat says, and touches his jaw with the pads of his fingers.

Dave starts crying.

Apparently he already was, just a couple of tears, but now his breath starts hitching and his nose starts stuffing up. He hates that shit, Bro would beat his ass if he caught him being such a pussy. At least he's not sobbing out loud. At least there's that.

He breathes in deep, dries his eyes with the collar of his shirt. His mouth keeps turning down. He makes himself look at Karkat. Karkat looks puzzled now, of all things. "Yeah, sorry. I'll be right back. Can I have my wrist back?"

"No," Karkat says.

Dave blinks. His eyes are damp. "Um."

"You asked. I -- no." Karkat's eyebrows furrow in that nervous, uneasy way he takes when he doesn't trust Dave's reactions to be sane or understandable or -- "If you wanted me to let go then you should have told me to, I hate polite rhetorical bullshit, I -- what the hell's your problem?!"

Dave yanks free, takes a step back, and then he's snarling, " _What the hell's **your** problem!_ What the fuck -- fuck you, okay, just fuck you!"

He's going to say worse, he's going to start throwing out orders; he bites his tongue on a 'get the fuck to your corner.' He's breathing harsh now, totally losing his shit, and he can't allow that, not in front of anyone and especially not Karkat. He turns around, stalks (escapes?) to the kitchen. Slams the door.

He yanks drawers open for a recently sharpened knife, slams them closed; it's not here, it's not there, it's not anywhere and who the fuck tidied this place, it's a fucking mess.

Doesn't help that he can't see for shit. No, fuck that noise, he's not letting it flow, he can just be blurry-eyed forever, they'll get him grandfather glasses, what the fuck ever. He's not crying. It's the most fucking stupid reason to cry, boohoo my enslaved demon won't _talk_ to me, when did he start imagining they were actually _friends_? When did he --

The kitchen door opens behind him, all slow and cautious like Dave is about to throw a saucepan at the first thing that comes through. For a second he's tempted.

No, not at Karkat, never at Karkat, but he wants to break shit so fucking badly.

He finds a knife, tests it on his thumb. Yeah, that'll do.

"I'm not supposed to let you get hurt," Karkat says -- so tentatively Dave's anger just peters out.

"Bloodletting doesn't count," Dave reminds him without looking his way, and lets himself sink in the closest chair. "I'll fill you a small coffee cup. Can't afford more. That works?" He stretches to pick up a cup from the drying rack.

"--Oh."

Karkat's voice is so small Dave can't help but glance at him. His dark lips are pressed tight together, chin tucked in, staring at the floor.

Dave pauses, forearm over the knife. "What?"

"Are you -- do you -- not want my teeth because I didn't want to--"

"No!" Dave replies without thought, dropping the knife on the table. He wants -- he wants to get down on the floor and pull him into a hug, but Karkat doesn't like hugs, right, he just humors him. Karkat doesn't like having sex with him, he's just hungry, Karkat doesn't like him, he just makes do. He's learned to tolerate Dave, is all.

He looks so small and rejected right now.

"... You can bite if you'd rather. So long as you're -- I wouldn't let you starve."

Karkat's mouth on him. Fuck. He can deal. He'll just -- he'll endure. It's what Karkat needs. He offers his forearm, face turned away.

Karkat doesn't take it. Dave glances back, a little annoyed (frustrated, exhausted, why can't this be over already.) His demon is biting at his own lip, staring at Dave's wrist.

"Um."

"What now."

Karkat looks away, as if embarrassed. "Are you going to pet me?"

After how well the last time went? "No," Dave replies, maybe a little too harsh. "You don't want me to."

" _No_ , I--" Karkat chews on his lip again. He's already picking up physical habits. Like the way he ruffles his wings when he's feeling vindicated, or how his tail will flick from side to side when he's about to go pouncing on things like an adolescent kitten. "I was angry," he admits, quiet already and then his voice drops even more, into something almost anguished. "I don't want Kankri to be incarnated."

Dave is on the floor and hugging him in the next second. He pauses -- bit late -- starts loosening his hold, but then Karkat sags against him with a sigh, butts his forehead against his shoulder.

"Sorry," Dave says. It's a pretty violent reaction just because he doesn't get along with Kankri. Dave wonders what Rose will make of it.

She'll have to make something of it once she sees it with her own eyes, because he isn't sharing this.

He hugs him a little tighter. Karkat's claws tug lightly at the waist of his shirt, gather a fistful of cloth.

Karkat wouldn't feel Dave rubbing his back, so Dave pets his wings. Karkat makes a rusty little _mrr_ and pushes his nose into Dave's neck.

It tickles, a little. "You can feed," Dave says, eyes closed tight, braced for the pain.

It occurs to him that he should have taken off his shirt first, it's going to be bloody, but by that point Karkat has already tugged his collar to the side; his teeth are kneading the flesh of Dave's neck, as if testing for the best place to bite. He doesn't have vampire teeth, a single pair of needles for deep but narrow punctures; all his teeth are triangles to lacerate in a jaw-wide arc.

Dave feels the oddly soothing wet warmth of his tongue, licking the skin, and then pressure, evenly distributed.

It stings a little when the first teeth part skin, and then it hurts -- a burn radiating from the muscle up his neck, down his back, his arm, warm tongues of pain... and then just warmth, like knotted muscles forced to relax under a massaging hand. His head feels oddly light, the world is spinning a little. He holds on tighter, tucking his hands over the roots of Karkat's wings, which wrap back over his forearms to pin them there, heh, almost like being hugged back, this is nice, he likes this. The pain in his neck is strangely muted; he can hear the wet noises Karkat's mouth makes as it sucks on the wound, the faint sighs of pleasure. Karkat likes blood, of course he does, it's his Aspect.

It aches to move his head right now with teeth imbedded in his muscle but Dave tilts it anyway so he can rest his jaw against Karkat's temple.

It's nice, that dizzy, floaty feeling, but it occurs to him that maybe it's not a great thing to encourage. With a sigh he tugs lightly on Karkat's wing.

Karkat pulls his teeth out slowly; Dave realize after a second that he's trying to pull them out perfectly straight so they won't widen or worry at the edges of the wounds on their way out. Dave scritches his wing in thanks.

"Mn, 'kay. I've got bandages in that cupboard..."

They're under the sink; they don't have to get up. Karkat stays kneeling between Dave's legs, close enough to feel his warmth, watches as Dave disinfects and tapes sterile cloth over the wound. He's still feeling floaty.

Karkat looks better, too, calm and a little curious, and mostly at peace. Dave leans in to press their foreheads together, closes his eyes, breathes.

"Wanna sleep on the futon with me?"

For a second Karkat stops breathing, and then he exhales, long and slow. "Yeah, okay."


	13. Chapter 13

Kankri's summoning is a lot less dramatic than Karkat's. Makes sense: Kankri is right here, and Karkat was ensconced somewhere in the farthest reaches of the demon realm. Kankri's summoning benefits from his own advice on the phase of the moon (waning, thanks ever so much for making everyone get up at three fucking AM, a time Dave had never seen from that end of the night) and other such ceremonial fiddly details; Karkat's was done pretty much blind.

Kankri wants to come; Karkat didn't.

They scream just as loud as each other.

"Whoa," Roxy says from her end of the pentacle. She waves smoke or mystical mist or whatever it is away from her face where the wind blows it, eyebrows arched. Dave can't see Rose or Jade, though on his other side Dirk is letting Meulin go, wisps of silky fur fading from his skin. He thinks the illusion of a lashing tufted tail actually does disperse some of the smoke trailing around Dirk's legs before it disappears in turn. Mages are weird.

Karkat is seated like a gargoyle behind him, silent and still, the way he's been ever since Dave forbade him to interfere. His intense stare seems to cut right through the smoke. He doesn't seem especially furious right now; maybe he gave up on that or maybe he's waiting for a chance to slip through a loophole in Dave's orders and kill his Blood counterpart. Who knows, with how loudly he was opposed to the summoning.

They haven't talked about it again, but Dave would be hard-pressed to forget.

"Huh," goes Dirk in an almost impressed way. Dave turns away from his demon.

The first impression Dave has of Kankri, Seer of Blood, is _wings_.

Mostly because, as they flail around clumsily to balance, one of them misses his face by about three inches.

The demon can't leave the circle yet; Dave reminds himself he wouldn't have been physically able to touch him, but the hook-tipped finger looked... pretty hook-y. Dave drags his eyes away from the lopsided flapping, just in time to see an armored, very Karkat-looking demon list on his side with the deceptive slowness of a capsizing sailboat, a body length's worth (from head to toes) in dragon tail rising like a wave from the floor to attempt to balance and only unbalancing him more.

Flop.

Dave pinches his lips. Well, he can't fall any farther down now.

"This is extremely unpleasant," says the demon in a vaguely bewildered voice.

Wow. "It's Karkat The Less Nubbly!" Roxy exclaims.

Dave goes "Nooo _kidding_ ," all slow and measured for emphasis, because... yeah. That.

Kankri's horns aren't anything anyone would call big or sharp -- there's at least that -- but they're still twice the size of Karkat's. He's slightly bigger, but the same smoke-gray, the same humanoid torso, the same armor seen from the back with the (longer) spines on each backbone segments... the same mess of tousled black hair. Dave almost doesn't think he needs to see his face.

He looks at Karkat over his shoulder. Dave's demon has moved into an unconcerned cat loaf pose, curled up like he's about to sleep and not to pounce, but his head is high and his eyes glow like embers about to blaze anew.

Rose clears her throat, and Dave snaps to attention again. Kankri wanted to come, but there is still that last chance for a trick. He yanks Damara to him -- he'll need at least that much if he wants a chance to kill Kankri before it kills his demon-less sister. Beside him Dirk's hair ripples in Eridan's choppy waves, his skin goes bruise-purplish and drowned gray, Rufioh's delicate butterfly wings fan out behind Roxy. Jade is too taxed from using Feferi to help create Kankri's body to be of much use, but the three of them will hopefully be enough.

Kankri sits up, back stiff, chin up, and coils his tail around his gathered limbs. He has to make several attempts at folding his wings before they will go over each other properly and not rake the ground. Rose waits politely.

"I am glad no lasting damage seems to have been wrought," she says. Kankri inclines his head.

"As far as my limited experience will -- oh, sound doesn't resonate through my skull _at all_ the same way it does yours." He sounds all chagrined. Rose is smiling like she wants to appear sympathetic but is actually trying not to laugh.

"Figures," Dave mutters, "I get the homicidal little shit who tries to gore me the second it can stand upright, and she gets the snooty tea-drinker."

Wow is it hard to keep appropriately watchful, and as a Seer Kankri might have planned for exactly that. Argh.

But when Rose leans in and offers her cut wrist, Kankri laps, delicately. (The tip of his tail is shivering.)

"Tell me your Name."

"I shall, insofar as you agree to review our terms and conditions and, if a reasonable being might find issue, renegotiate any and all of your terms and conditions before any and all use thereof."

Karkat lets out a loud, rattling growl. "For fuck's sake! Are you trying to delay having to come out and face me?"

Kankri turns to look at Karkat over his shoulder, and unsurprisingly enough his face is ... Dave wants to say identical, but their expressions are different enough to change a lot.

They're both much too pretty for their own good, at the very least. Also, red eyes, only Kankri's are heavy-lidded with false boredom.

"Please do not display any more comprehension issues than you possess in truth, that is disingenuous to the extreme."

"Wow, nice backhand there," Dave says. Karkat is stiff with offense; he takes a few steps closer to the circle, wings spread in threat. Tiny, adorable, not even arm's length wings. Tiny stubby bobtail.

Kankri flicks the whip end of his ridiculously long tail once, deliberately, and curls it back around himself. Dave pats his demon's closest horn.

"There, there, bigger just means more areas to target."

Especially since for the thicker third of its length Kankri's tail is only armored on top. The underside is the same velvety-soft as Karkat's.

"Did he just condition giving his name on the ability to negotiate all of his terms of binding?" Dirk is asking Rose, sounding borderline impressed.

Rose nods, smiling. Shit, they're going to be here _hours_.

\--

They are.

 _One hour, forty-seven minutes,_ Damara tells him when pressed. _Not hours more than one. You whine. Annoyance. Let me go._

_We agreed you'd stay as long as I might need you. If you leave early, I'm not paying you._

She sneers at him inside his head, but she stays. Dave stretches his legs one after the other along one of the sides of the circle, ass on the floor, careful not to breach it. He wishes he could tweet, check his feeds -- even in the middle of the night there'd have to be _someone_ awake -- but this close to an active circle that just ain't happening.

Karkat is once again cat-loafing it, though this time he has oozed as close to the circle as he could without touching anything. When Dave leans back on his hands, his elbow touches Karkat's shoulder.

"Funny you're not trying to interrupt, I thought you'd be yelling at him to hurry up way before this."

Karkat snorts, without looking at him. "Why would I interfere with his negotiations? There'll be time to fight later."

Dave grumbles. He was hoping for some support there. Fff.

And here they go again with Kankri trying to get Rose to keep being "chaste in deed, if not in thought" and Rose basically being all Rosingly "HAHAHAno." He'll have to ask if Kankri gave her his price in the end, because if she doesn't intend to keep -- urgh, things he did not need to think about his twin sister, number 157789 -- "seeking for herself or offering others no sexual pleasure of her own will, alone or assisted" then he's not sure how she'll feed him. Kankri won't be interested in Karkat's diet, that's for sure, and sexual frustration is, while apparently more of a constant low-level thing, far less potent than an actual orgasm.

So Rose must have Kankri's price. But he still wants her celibate. Yeah, good luck with that one. Dave's brain shies away from visualizing (twin sister!) but he tries to imagine being forbidden to spank the monkey for _months_ on end, and... "Wow, they'd have found me dead of demon with my dick in hand about two weeks in, tops."

"Do I even want to know. Hint, the answer is no. The answer is always no. Unless it's hell fucking no, I will go take a luxurious bath in a tub of oil first and carelessly toss a dozen lit matches if you push it, and also no."

Dave snorts. Karkat must be getting bored too.

Now Kankri is trying to talk her down to once a month! Maybe twice! If they talk about the pearl-diving habits of his sister one second longer Dave is going to implode. "You've been going around in more and more useless circles for the last half-hour, can we please just get a fucking move on?"

Rose and Kankri stare at each other, and exchange duelist nods.

Rose fires first. "You understand, naturally, that should you choose not to enter my service I will therefore destroy the physical envelope I procured you for the express goal of serving me."

Karkat shifts his weight in more of a pouncing position, intensity coming back to his eyes. Dave knows why the next second.

"Naturally," says Kankri, smooth and urbane as always. " And for the sake of full transparency, you realize that you are surrounded entirely by your loved ones, and for this short time I am, indeed, corporeal."

Is that an actual threat? It's a hell of a lot closer than the silky allusions from the last two hours, at least. Dirk whistles, amused, saltwater starting to puddle at his feet.

"I am also surrounded, as it were, by several summoners, and by Karkat. Who is a Knight and not a Seer, and who has the advantage of long days of corporeal experience, including several battles. One wonders who might come out on top..."

Kankri tilts his head. "You seem awfully certain you would have Karkat's full and willing cooperation in this endeavor. There are more people here than his Master, though I might understand that you feel closer to this one than the rest. Is one, ah... _twin_ equivalent to three _not_?"

Ouch.

Rose's smile only widens. Whoops.

"It's been a pleasure to spar with you, Kankri, but Dave is right; it's getting much too late to indulge anymore."

Karkat frowns, sneaks Dave a look. "What is she...?"

"Not a clue," Dave admits, but then again he generally doesn't.

"You're not here out of idle curiosity, Kankri, are you. You are somewhat extremely invested in being here. Or, should I say... not being elsewhere."

Kankri goes stiff, huge sail wings opening in a threat display admittedly more impressive than Karkat's. "Firing shots in the dark now, Detective-Summoner Rose Lalonde?"

"You came here to hide." A softer, almost gentle tone; "I had Terezi confirm it for me. Your name, Kankri."

He stares at her, stiff to the very tip of his tail. Dave's brows are up. Ooookay. Kankri is hiding in the mortal world. What the hell. Did some other demon get annoyed at his preaching or what?

"I have not admitted to anything," he says through gritted teeth, eventually. When his voice vibrates with smothered growls it sounds a lot more like Karkat's.

"Of course not," Rose replies, still in that gentle, coaxing tone Dave usually only hears when she talks to her cats. "Nothing passed your lips, metaphorical or otherwise. And nothing you did or did not say has any relation to the fact that -- _if you belong to me, then I will protect you_."

Staring contest, again.

For some reason Dave feels pretty sure about this one's outcome.

Ten seconds later he's proven right. Kankri breathes in, breathes out -- slow and controlled -- and gives in.

For not even a second Dave is walking in a desert -- an eternity of sand and dead rock and not even dead trees, nothing is alive here, nothing has ever been -- and his mouth is so parched his tongue sticks, his eyeballs are so dry they feel packed with sand, he's not even sweating anymore. He would give anything for water, but there's so little left of him and no one, nothing to give it to.

(He could summon from that much name. If he had any affinity at all, okay, but. He wonders how much more Rose received.)

"Kankri Vantas. Seer of Blood."

" _Vantas_." Dave rolls the name in his mouth. Yep. "Vantas. Raise your hand if you saw it coming."

Dave raises his own hand. Jade and Roxy do, too, lips pinched; Dirk nods. Karkat growls like he's embarrassed.

"Shut up."

"Is he like your demon dad or something."

"I will piss on everything you own, and your cameras twice. It will be _fucking worth it_."

"Ex-husband maybe."

"Awrgh!"

Karkat stalks away from him around the edge of the pentacle, eyes fixed on the other demon, waiting for the second Rose finishes feeding him her blood a second time. He looks like a tiger pacing a cage, only the irritating visitor is locked up inside.

Sometimes -- not even half the time, not even a fourth, but sometimes -- demons who share an Aspect will share the second part of their verbalized Name, too, and no one really knows why. Half of those demons who have the same last name have been known to be mortal enemies. If Kankri and Karkat can't tolerate being in the same space...

Dave made sure to forbid him to injure Kankri for no reason, but the hostility alone will make it a real pain to deal with.

Rose signals, and Jade steps back out of the circle, which snaps open with a little burst of power. Dave breathes out and gets back on his feet. Not like he fears Kankri taking a swipe at anyone anymore, shackled like he is, but his ass is falling asleep.

Kankri gets up on all fours, cautiously ruffles his wings and loosens his tail, and Karkat is on him.

"Karkat!" Dave snaps, but his demon is already bouncing off his target, which is flattened face-down on the ground.

Kankri pushes himself up on his hands, looking hilariously offended. "Really! That was exceptionally juvenile--"

"Blame my Master for the lack of adult-rated gore," Karkat replies with a flash of teeth, and pounces again.

"Karkat, _no_ , I expected better of -- oof!"

Okay. There's no blood, and with the armor Kankri sports there won't even be a bruise. Dave frowns, nudges Jade with his elbow. "Think I should stop him? Or should we let them get the dominance bullshit out of their system or what?"

Jade shrugs, both eyebrows way up in bafflement. "Ask me about dogs and I'll tell you, but demons..."

Karkat never touches Kankri more than one second at a time, Dave can't help but notice. Bounce on, bounce off. Kankri's balance is shit and he hasn't figured out to lock his elbows; he goes down every single time.

"Honestly! -- no -- will you stop -- I am asking you politely to -- ooh, _that's it!_ "

They're expecting him to bite back.

" _Master!_ " he goes instead, staring at Rose reprovingly.

It sounds pretty much exactly like " _Mooooom!_ "

Rose bites her made-up lip. It doesn't work. Two seconds later they're all laughing -- the humans at least. Rose waves her hand in apology, still chuckling. "Sorry, sorry. Karkat, please stop antagonizing Kankri."

Karkat arches an eyebrow at her in mock surprise. "Wow, since when does my Master have mammary glands? Is that a magic trick?"

Dave groans. "Augh! Karkat _Vantas_ , stop pouncing on Kankri, and _stop mentioning Rose's boobs_." Karkat grumbles under his breath and gives Kankri a calculating look. Dave sighs. "Do I have to order you to heel, buddy?"

"...Mnrgh no."

Roxy is _still_ laughing. "Oh god. Oh god. Guys!"

"What?" Dirk answers obligingly.

"Guys -- they're _brothers_!"

Kankri draws himself up. "We are most certainly _not_. That human-centric term is wholly inadequate for either the pseudo-biological or societal bond that--"

" _Kankri!_ "

"--we share. Don't be silly, Karkat, of course they would already have deduced that we are no strangers to each other, and a while ago at that."

Karkat throws a hand up in the air like the frustrated pizza guy in the movie they watched yesterday, which he has apparently adopted as his own. It's hilarious. "You don't have to _confirm_ it!"

Dave gives Karkat a suspicious look, which his demon doesn't even notice, too busy glaring daggers at his... yeah, Dave is going with brother. "Dude. You ever hear of two demons coming out of a gate looking the same? 'cause I haven't."

He can tell another argument is coming. He lifts his hand, palm out.

"Stop. We are going the fuck home and I am going to sleep the last three hours of sleep I can get before the day officially starts. You can spend that time plotting his demise for all I care." He looks around at his siblings and his partner; they nod. Jade cracks her knuckles and then her spine. Dirk ambles away to gather the circle-drawing stuff.

"I have to admit I'm very glad to have gotten a day off," Rose tells Dave as they make their way to the stairs, demons following on their heels and glaring at each other. "Kankri will need time to settle in. How did Karkat handle his first day?"

"Uh." Dave ponders. "Mostly snarled a lot. Also he spent his first night sowing forks and making glass towers and drawing birds. The finger kind. I don't think you'll have to worry about that with Kankri, doesn't seem his style somehow."

He smothers a yawn. It's not even only the lack of sleep; Rose used him for his connection to the Blood aspect through Karkat, his life energy took a hit.

Roxy was there because Void balances Light, but it wasn't like Light was a big component of the spell, it was just passively around because of Rose, and Dirk was there because they needed a fifth to stabilize the pattern and he wanted to observe, but mostly because both of them are blood-related to Rose. Neither of them is that drained. Then again Jade is by far the most tired of all bar none.

Two steps down in the staircase he turns around to look for her, ask if she wants to be driven home.

The two demons are on the edge of the first step, and at first Dave thinks they're glaring at each other to decide who gets to go first, but it doesn't take him half a second to realize that's not it at all. Karkat is eyeing Kankri from underneath, a bit, wary and frowning.

Kankri is frozen on the edge, staring at the stairs.

"Ah," he says, like he just remembered he forgot to put away the milk. "...Ah."

Dave's brow furrows. "Rose, wait up."

Kankri lowers his head, squints at the first step, lifts a hand and puts it back down in the exact same place it was.

"What's wrong?" Rose asks.

"It's -- a bit high?"

Karkat growls at him. "Brace on the walls with your stupid wings, they're certainly big enough."

"Bad plan," Dirk says from behind them, "He's got no clue what to do with them, and long as they are he might put weight on them at a bad angle and break them."

Kankri gingerly puts a hand down on the first step, and throws himself back.

"I -- I don't. It's. High."

Dave thinks about Karkat throwing himself off the mezzanine with careless trust in his own body, and shakes his head. They're built the same, save for tail and wings -- granted, that's a lot of additional weight -- and Karkat has no trouble with stairs.

Then again he does tend to race down like he's only narrowly avoiding rolling down instead. Shortish arms and long legs are _not_ an advantage when going downhill.

"Use your tail to keep your center of gravity in your hips," Rose advises as she climbs back up a few steps.

"That is very. Pertinent advice. Logical. Yes."

It gets clear pretty fast that he has no idea _how_.

It's almost funny how the most verbose demon _ever_ is just so completely tongue-tied. Only Dave doesn't know if Kankri can throw up even if there's never been anything in his stomach, and from his expression they might get to find out soon.

It'd be funny if Dave didn't want to go to bed already. Fuck. "Think we can carry him?"

"With the spines?" Dirk retorts.

Roxy purses her lips. "He could go on his butt, like babies do."

"We could shove him head first," Karkat grouches, and jabs him in the side. Kankri jumps a little, even though Karkat poked him in the armor.

And then the heel of his hand skips on the edge of the step and he takes a header down the stairs.

Fear makes him bristle all over, flares his wings wide; Dave catches a glimpse of Dirk, trying to snatch his tail in passing and having to draw back before he's cut, and then a hard shoulder impacts with his thigh and he's shoved off his step in turn. He jumps down to the next and the next on one foot, trying to regain his balance, feels his sister's hands on his back trying to brace him, but Kankri is heavy and he can feel both his and Rose's centers of gravity shifting in the worst direction entirely.

Karkat eels in under a large wing and slams his shoulder in the other demon's side, pins him to the wall, one cricket leg pressed on the opposite wall. Dave's hand finds the guardrail; he hauls himself back upright, feels Rose's hands clench on his shirt and tug as she regains her balance.

"Guys, you okay?"

"Peachy keen. Phew."

Karkat is giving Kankri the _weirdest_ look.

It's not angry, or suspicious or resentful or anything. It's... Dave isn't sure. Stunned? Yeah, stunned works. It's just that it makes no sense. Kankri isn't doing anything, eyes clenched shut and stiff all over, claws digging in the stairs under him.

"Karkat, you doing okay?"

"--uh. Yeah. Fine. Fatass is getting heavy, though. Move farther down."

Yeah, no, that's not fine, that's still baffled and hesitant. "You sure, dude?"

"That you should move down? _Yes_."

Dave gives in and moves down to the first landing, following Rose. Karkat maneuvers himself under Kankri somehow, spines thankfully flat, straightens up a bit to take his weight. Kankri flails in panic when his hands stop touching the floor and clings, claws digging in Karkat's plastron. "Hey," Dave protests, but the demon is too busy moaning to listen, or to stop pressing his wings hard against the walls, either. He's too scared to pay attention.

Karkat headbutts him under the chin. That works.

With no warning he's rushing down the stairs, only on his back legs like he almost never does, but bent double under Kankri's weight; he looks like a velociraptor a little bit. He comes to a rather bumpy stop against the landing's wall, braking as he does with his elbow.

"Augh! _Karkat Vantas_ , you -- this is utterly -- how dare you _no no no stop!_ "

When Karkat hauls Kankri past Dave and Rose as they press tight in the corner, he's smirking like a fiend.

Another flight of stairs goes by in jaunty bounces and garbled slices of 'triggering' and 'gravity-related trauma' and 'unfair.' Dave jogs down after them.

Karkat shoulders the door to the Demon Crimes room open and unceremoniously dumps Kankri on the floor, and then he sits and grooms, little tail quivering happily. Cutest. Fucking. Thing.

Kankri is braced on four splayed limbs and shuddering. The thin membranes of his wings show it the most, wobbling like cherry jello. Rose goes to him, sits on her haunches at his side, head tilted to peer at him. "Kankri? Are you alright?"

"I -- I do not believe I am injured. The mental trauma, of course--"

He stops talking on his own, instead of someone talking over him. Which is just weird, considering who he is.

Karkat frowns at him, and pokes his shoulder like he's handling a live bomb, cautious approach and fast retreat. "What's the matter, now? Come on, you should be able to pinpoint it, don't you have those amazing self-analysis skills or what the fuck ever?"

"It's nothing you should concern yourself about," Kankri retorts with a half-hearted disapproving frown of his own. He sits on the floor, lungs expanding maybe a _little_ too far for normal, 'I'm cool' breathing.

"It's nothing I _would_ concern myself about, only you're in _my_ police station, mooching off _my_ human's -- related person, and breathing _my_ oxygen molecules in your gross spongy lungs. Spill it."

Aw, he's Karkat's human. Heh.

They're pretty much all standing around watching the demon theater now. Shit's too weird and hilarious to pass up.

"I merely underestimated the vast difference there would be between riding a human and being ensconced in a body of my own. The -- Detective Lalonde naturally had reflexes and well-ingrained routines of her own at the subconscious level and it's a lot of effort to... to..."

Karkat groans and slaps his own forehead. "Don't _pay attention_ to that shit, dunderfuck, you'll just bluescreen yourself!"

The two demons are facing each other and they've totally forgotten the humans. Kankri's controlled expression is almost entirely gone; he clings to calm with all his claws but the rest of him is well over the edge of Panic Cliff.

"I _can't_ stop! How do you stop? Blood flow and -- how many tiny, tiny -- capillaries, yes, that is the right word, how many are there, how many organs, muscles, things are moving inside and fluids and all manner of secretions, energy bursting and flashing in such tiny, discrete increments along my, my _neural pathways_? And it laces up and down and around my blood, and there's so much blood in my wings and it's all so close to the surface and there's outside molecules pressed on it every time anything moves. And there's -- I did not expect gravity to be so -- I hoped, since _you_ could not fly, that maybe I would, that it was simply a matter of not allowing the laws of this plane of existence to convince me I belong here, but this body is incredibly heavy and I know that I know how to move it but _it won't stop being here!_ "

Rose reaches out, hesitates to touch -- no wonder, if he's that overwhelmed then physical contact might well do the opposite of helping. Dave winces a little.

"Suggestions?" she asks, frowning.

"Sorry, Karkat never did this."

But Karkat is still staring at the other demon, all intense like maybe a cat at a mouse hole and maybe a cat who's wondering if that mouse is actually a Rottweiler.

"Okay," he says, sudden and rough, awkward. He looks away for a second, embarrassed, forces himself to turn back to face Kankri. "Okay, you need to do this now. Breathe in. No, shut up, just put air in your lungs. Do it. Nothing else you have to do. Just that."

Miracle of miracles, Kankri does.

"Good. Work on releasing it slowly, like, draw it out. Okay. Yeah. Breathe in -- slowly. Keep it. Release. You -- you're doing good. Not so bad, I mean. Feel it? Goes in... Goes out. Your lungs know what to do. If there's a problem they'll tell you -- breathe out -- you don't need to pay attention."

" _I totally taught him that_ ," Dave whispers to Dirk, and pretends to swoon a little bit, entirely ironically. (Mostly to disguise how sincere his attack of d'aww is.)

Still, it's... strange, how Karkat is looking at Kankri. Tentative, surprised. What at? So far Kankri's been just as much of a pompous priss as he comes across through Rose, and Dave was mostly expecting Karkat to be smug about freaking him out. He hates him, right?

Brothers. Maybe he doesn't.

"Are you feeling better now, Kankri?" Rose asks, sitting on her haunches, knees tidily together. "We'll be taking the elevator for the next floors."

"Ah -- maybe -- a minute?"

"You can stop breathing, stupid. Okay, no, don't stop breathing, just stop the. The thing."

Dave snerks.

"Well, now that all's well and good..." Jade goes. Dave turns to look at her; her eyes are half-lidded and she's leaning on Dirk's shoulder. "I need to crash, guys, so I'm taking the elevator now. C'mon, Strider, you're driving me home."

They wave goodbye and go. Dave lets his hand drop, eyes Roxy and Rose. "You got something set up?"

"Yeah, I drove us." Roxy eyeballs Kankri's wings, winces. "I've got a neighbor's truck, he should fit okayish. Like, at an angle. I hope. If we leave the back open."

"Shit, my car's way too small to help."

"Nah, we'll manage."

And then they both blink, and look toward the closed elevator door.

"Um."

"Welp."

"Think the guys from Vice would have the service elevator key?"

\--

They eventually get to the underground parking lot. Accounting for how long it'll take him to get back home, Dave's sleeping time is down to _two hours and twenty minutes. Nineteen-fifty-five. Nineteen-fifty._

_Damara, why are you even still here._

_Stupid man says stay, then says why not have left. I am not a dog._

_Oh yeah, you are._ Bluh. He doesn't feel awake and rested enough to deal with her without grumpiness that might backfire eventually. He tries to tone it down, somewhat. _You're the kind of dog that can take off someone's leg in one big chomp._

Thankfully, she's flattered rather than angry; she laughs in his ear --  _yes! You know it. Bow wow._ \-- and allows herself to be shooed off with a clock dropped on the asphalt and stepped on as vigorously as Dave can.

Ow, his heel.

He crouches and sweeps the debris in his hand, and then into a little bag to throw away later.

Okay, two hours of sleep. Yeah. More of a nap, but he'll deal. Tonight he is going to bed at, wow, yes, ten PM. Sounds awesome. Maybe even _nine_. (Oh lord, he has finally become an adult. How'd that happen.)

He turns back to Rose and Roxy; Kankri has managed to fit himself in the back of the truck, wings folded as tight as he can. Karkat is by the open back door, looking in. His wings are clenched along his sides.

"Karkat, man? Time to get in our car, c'mon."

He throws Dave a quick, furrowed-eyebrows look, mouth turned down into a little fretting pout.

"Can I. Can I ride with him? I won't break anything."

Dave blinks. Didn't he tell Karkat they were going home, not back to Rose and Roxy's?

Only the longer he stays quiet and the more Karkat droops.

"You could even order me to obey Rose for the trip." A last hesitation, and then he speaks, right over Dave. "... Please -- Master?"

Oh.

The thing is, Karkat doesn't call him Master, or only when he's pissed off at him or Dave just gave him a real, important order like "save that baby" or "kill that thing dead."

(Karkat doesn't call him Dave either. He calls him asshole or idiot or whatever other insult Dave has earned recentlyish. "My human" is the most positive bar none so far.)

Maybe he can squeeze in a half-hour's nap instead of lunch. "Okay. Obey Rose for the duration of the trip, don't injure Kankri or deliberately make his freaking out worse. Hop in."

Karkat does, with startling speed; he steps over the curl of Kankri's tail and under the edge of his wing, and hunkers down, claws digging into the bottom of the truck to secure himself. They're not touching, Karkat still leans away from him, watches him with strange bursts of nervous suspicion, but they're close enough that they could, easy.

 _I don't want Kankri to be incarnated._ He's changing his tune already, apparently. Pff. Dave lets Roxy close the backdoor and goes to his car.

\--

Roxy and Rose share a little townhouse in a relatively nice area. (Dave isn't sure how they manage; he loves his brothers but if he has to live under the same roof as Bro or Dirk ever again he'll have to turn himself in for attempted murder three days in. He finally has a hot water tank all of his own and he will be damned if he lets it go.) The garden is a stripe of grass with a forged iron fence before it to keep dogs from pissing on it that the girls found pretty or something, and which makes Karkat and Kankri shudder and pull their wings in tight as they pass it.

"We're settling him in, and then going home, yeah?" he tells Karkat, without much hope. Karkat harrumphs at him and starts poking his nose through every door he can get at without leaving the corridor Dave stands in.

"Nosy little brat," Roxy says. She laughs and yawns at the same time; Rose waves her off.

"Go to bed, Roxy."

Dave kind of hates her because she'll only have to come in this afternoon. He suffers his cheek to be kissed anyway. He's a prince like that.

Rose is leading the demons into the living room, so Dave follows. Karkat is poking at the thick, furry carpet as Kankri hauls himself ponderously onto the couch.

"Please, Karkat, do not stay on the floor like an animal. There's an unused armchair that I'm sure Detective Lalonde wouldn't begrudge you," Kankri adds with a side look at Rose.

"Of course not," she replies urbanely. Karkat growls.

"Back spines, stupid, I'd have to sit straight and not lean on anything. Sure sounds comfortable to me!" He kneads the furry carpet and flops down with a challenging glare at the other demon.

Kankri himself is sitting ramrod straight, hands on his knees, wings cautiously draped over the back of the couch, tail coiled on the cushions; it spans the whole couch from armrest to armrest, even with the part that's doubling back to his ass. It's like he thinks if he can sit as properly as possible they'll stop seeing the armored bits. Weird.

"How is your, ah, sensory perception issue?"

"Much better now that I am out of that vehicle, thank you. And Karkat, in the interest of fairness and full disclosure I admit I did not understand your issue with them before I was incarnate, lacking as I did the proper frame of experience. It was--"

"Yeah, yeah, apology accepted, and you're lucky you didn't throw up on me. It'll get better, anyway. You'll get desensitized."

"What even is the problem with cars?" Dave asks, and is met by two red, annoyed gazes.

"They stink," Karkat says curtly, and turns away.

Yeah, Dave is believing that. So believing that. He's building it a church with his own bare hands, he believes it so much. Oh, Karkat probably thinks it -- he can't lie so completely to Dave -- but it's _so_ not the real issue.

Blargh.

Rose leaves the room to go get Kankri his first meal. The Vantases keep sniping at each other. Dave watches.

They're disturbingly identical in a lot of ways, and entirely opposite in all of the rest. The faces are the same, the red and gold eyes; Karkat's eyes glare out fiercely, ready to attack, while Kankri's are set heavy-lidded like a shop's rolling grilles ready to come down, disdainful and distant.

Behind all the sniping they get along like a house on fire -- a lot of screams and flailing but ain't no way to get the flame and the walls to part ways now.

"So, Kankri," he cuts in. He gets stared at like they are not appreciating the reminder that he still exists; it's one of their rare similar expressions. "Why did Karkat not want you corporeal?"

The stare he receives then -- a shudder goes up his spine; he feels Latula's dragon wings close around his mind, and is reminded quite forcefully that Kankri is a seer, that no doubt he sees everything about Dave, the pathetic jealousy most of all.

"Karkat's reasons are his own, and not for me to speculate," he says, frosty. "If you wish to know so ardently, may I advise you to order him by way of his Name to betray his innermost secrets and bare his soul to your prurient nosiness."

Dave's shoulders have gone so tense they hurt. "Oh, fuck you," he growls, tired, and turns away. From the corner of his eye he sees Karkat twitch up, looking torn, and waves him back down without looking back. "Stay with Kankri. Don't break anything."

Kankri hasn't been ordered to stay in the room. Shit.

Whatever. Like he's going to move his spiky ass off his couch throne now.

"Stop _defending_ me, shitmunch," he hears Karkat saying as he walks away, and, "I assure you I would have mentioned the same were it any other..." and then he's in the kitchen. He closes the door behind him.

"Did you really think they would answer you?" Rose asks without turning to look at him.

Dave shrugs, hands in his pockets. "Meh. Had to ask."

He busies himself helping. Rose is preparing a spread of just about everything she has, and even bothering to make it pretty. The bacon is curled into _flowers_ for fuck's sake. There's cherry tomatoes and carrot sticks too and whatever else. Celery. Chocolate. A bowl of fruit salad. Karkat is going to be so jealous.

"Here, make a second bowl."

"Stop reading my mind."

"Terezi is absolutely not reading anything at the moment, dear brother."

"I didn't say Terezi, I said _you_. You witch."

She quirks him a tiny smirk. "Seer, if you please."

"Also can you let me have the last word some days, like maybe make an exception sometimes so I don't get a complex, thanks."

"Of course, David."

"Argh." His name isn't even really David, legally speaking. It's just Dave, but if he reminds her she'll call him Dave Lalonde next -- _oh, but it IS your legal middle name!_ \-- and David is marginally less worse.

He lets Rose charge him like a mule and they go back down the corridor.

"--worried far too much about that anyway, Karkat, mere logic should have told you that a physical body would cause sufficient interference, and frankly I find it quite soul-ist that--"

"Shut up, that's not a word."

"I admit it is not one of my better efforts. Very well, what about--"

"No, Kankri. There is _no word_ for someone who is bigoted against a part of a being's soul. None. It is not any form of bigotry that exists or ever existed or will ever exist."

Rose and Dave blink at each other in silence, standing in the shadow of the corridor with food plates on their hands. Rose's eyes narrow in thought, and she goes still, listening even more deliberately; Dave winces a little, to himself, but stays quiet.

"Anyway, what was that shit about her _protecting_ you? During the summoning."

"I -- Karkat, I cannot tell you."

"Sure you fucking can."

"No I _fucking_ can't," the priss of the century rasps back.

"... Oh. Shit."

"Quite."

"Did they leave any other orders?"

"None that should interfere with my service to Detective Lalonde, thankfully, and would it be possible to stop inferring? It's extremely uncomfortable."

"Very fucking well, would a hypothetical summoner that you did not fucking have hypothetically leave other long-term commands apart from shutting the fucking fuck up about their nonexistent ass?"

"That's called a _confidentiality clause_ , and would be a perfectly reasonable precaution to take if they -- hssst."

That was a sound of pain. Rose walks in. "Kankri? Are you alright?"

"Yes, thank you," he replies, teeth gritted, eyes tight in pain.

Is it just Dave or does Kankri not look surprised one bit to see them? Karkat does. Seer of Blood, Dave reminds himself, he probably saw their veins right through the wall or some shit.

Which means they were supposed to hear the talk about his previous summoner, the dude who really doesn't want anyone else to know they used to call on Kankri.

The dude Kankri needs protection from.

 _Iiinteresting_.

What kind of summoner does a demon run to the material world to escape? Especially when they'd usually just need to refuse to take on a second contract, once the first task was done. Hmm.

Rose is perched beside Kankri on the couch, petting his head gently. Somehow Dave is pretty sure she hasn't pricked herself even once on any quills he might have. He's tilting his head into it, but there's a puzzled look on his face, like he isn't sure if he's okay with it or not.

"This is a rather condescending gesture, isn't it? It seems to imply I am your domesticated companion animal."

"I'd pat your shoulder in friendly support if you would feel it at all, Kankri, I am merely choosing function over symbolism. Do you want me to stop?"

"... Yes," he says, but slowly, eyeing her sideways a bit, like he's testing.

Rose of course takes her hand off. "Very well. You have your choice of finger foods, fork, and chopsticks."

Dave puts Karkat's food down on the coffee table, plops his ass down in the armchair nearby, tells his demon he can eat. Karkat is tucking his legs under the coffee table and shoveling it in in a hot second, pointing out stuff Kankri totally doesn't want and should let Karkat have and stuff he might actually not like for real, at least not his first time. Careful, this one has juice inside, it's going to spurt. Stuff like that.

Definitely brothers. There is no way Karkat doesn't care a shit-ton.

Dave predictably falls asleep in his armchair watching the cute.

\--

"Dave?" Rose is poking him. Dave blinks his eyes open. His head hurts, he feels worse than before he slept. Today is going to be a pain in the ass.

Only a reading lamp is lit. He squints at the fluffy rug in front of him. The coffee table has been slid almost entirely off it; the two demons are asleep, wrapped up around each other. Kankri's tail and wings give him the advantage, but Karkat stubbornly managed to drape his little wing over Kankri's head and a thigh across his back.

Dave is a bad, remorseless man, so he totally pulls out his phone and takes a photo.

He doesn't upload it, and not only because he doesn't think they want it common knowledge yet that Rose has embodied a demon.

Totally sets it as his phone background though.

"If you want to be on time for work, you need to go pretty soon."

"What are you even doing up, did you sleep at all."

She smiles at him, and combs his hair away from his forehead before handing him his shades, which he must have dislodged in his sleep. Whoops. He puts them on, only slightly embarrassed.

"I was taking notes. I do have a whole free day after this, I can afford it."

Dave snorts, but she's right, it's time to go. He extracts himself from his armchair, cracks his spine, then crouches to scritch behind Karkat's ear.

"Hey, sleepyhead. Time for work. Mostly paperwork today, you can sleep under my desk."

Karkat blinks up at him with his upper eyes, the lower ones scrunching stubbornly closed. Ahh, shit's illegal levels of cute.

"Wake up," Dave says, in a voice he _knows_ is too tender by half with his sister watching, and which he can't help at all. "Got a job to do, people to keep safe, criminals to vanquish, doughnuts to decimate, all that good stuff."

"Mnrgh. Okay, okay."

Karkat extracts himself from his cuddlepile. Dave stiffly absconds to the bathroom for a quick whiz.

He comes back to Rose rummaging in a drawer. "Wait a second, I had something I bought for Kankri and Karkat, I'll give Karkat his now... Here, this is yours."

Karkat takes the package from her hand and Dave doesn't understand what it is until he turns it over in his hands.

It's a silvery, hand's length rocket-shaped thing. Very ergonomic. Very elegant.

Very dildo-y.

" _What the fuck, Rose?!_ "

His screech makes Kankri's dragon tail twitch, slide along the floor; one of the blades slices where his ankle should have been, only Karkat yanked him out of reach. Dave regains his balance, still gasping for breath and pointing at the -- the _thing_ in his demon's other hand.

"I thought controlling the vibration might get them used to physical sensations faster. And there are different settings, and I'm relatively sure the strongest will be felt even through armor. What do you think, Karkat? It's supposed to feel nice."

"Feel nice," Dave chokes. Rose arches an eyebrow at him. She is evil. His sister is evil. He'd always suspected, but now it's confirmed. "Rose. _You brought a dildo for my demon_."

She snorts, eyebrows quirked up in startled (fake) innocence (also fake). "It's a _massaging aid_ , Dave, if you please."

"It's a dildo. A vibrating dildo. Oh my god." He needs to sit down. Yes.

Oh hey he's already sitting on the coffee table. Huh.

"It's only a dildo if it's used for sexual stimulation," Rose counters reasonably. "Karkat and Kankri need sensory stimulation which they can self-apply. This is the best solution." Karkat is watching them in turn like he's watching a tennis match where Dave is the guy getting pummeled. Rose takes the package out of Karkat's hand, opens it, _turns it on oh lord_.

She applies the side of it to his demon's shoulder.

"Can you feel that?"

"Huh," says Karkat, not grossed out at all that there's a phallic sex toy touching him. "Weird." Good! "Not bad." Not good! Karkat takes it from her hand, applies it to his own ribs, curious. Dave can't look away. It's the horror that does it.

"Surely you would not refuse your demon his own... massaging aid," Rose says, reasonable and nice and a _lying witch_.

Karkat looks up at Dave and clutches the thing to his chest, already looking offended.

Dave gives like a philanthrope hoping to impress some choice babes with his tax deductible donations. "Yeah okay fine."

Shut up, crotch beast.

"But no playing with it during work hours."

He doesn't care how disappointed Karkat looks. If he hears a whirr coming from under the desk he will never be able to stand ever again.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, I've added illustrations from [saeto15](http://saeto15.tumblr.com/) and [manyblinkinglights](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/) to several previous chapters, if you guys want to take a look.

At least Karkat has gone back to resting his chin on Dave's knee, in the week between their blow-up and Kankri's summoning. At least there's that.

There's a strange cautiousness to it now, though. Karkat will come sprawl on the couch against him, and nap on the futon, but there's -- he keeps _watching_ Dave.

Dave tries not to notice. He often fails.

Dave tries more, harder, to get his hands off Karkat the second he expresses discomfort. That shit he did, trying to go down on him -- he doesn't like it. He doesn't like how it made him feel back then -- horrible, dirty, rejected. ~~Heartbroken~~. He doesn't like how it makes him feel now.

It would have been rape. (Like this whole situation isn't rapey enough.) It would have been. The worst is he'd have managed to borderline rape himself on top, in some twisted, completely ridiculous way where he was not even wanting it one bit but kept trying to make Karkat want him back with shit Karkat had explicitly told him he didn't want.

Too many wants in this thought. Dave works his fingers through thin quills, to Karkat's skull and pets and ruffles gently. Karkat's eyelids droop.

Asshole spent the morning napping blissfully under Dave's desk. Dave spent it working with his brain dragging through molasses, except when it was slipping into vibrator-pondering asides.

Totally productive, those. Time to get better ones.

**#fuckyeahpetdemon i wonder if im ever gonna need to trim his quills what if they bleed**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon worse what if they grow at the same rate as his hair ouch**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon dont even know if his hair grows at all what if it stays birdnesty all his fleshy life**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon and like his quills are the only thing that grows and he ends up like a porcupine and pokes me at every cuddle**

Sigh. He puts his phone back down; his other hand is still buried in Karkat's hair. His demon is looking up, eyebrow quirked in question.

Oh hey a message ping.

**@turntechGodhead dude, you shouldn't nightblog at noon, shit's just wrong :p**

**@rkmarciano fuk u i was busy doing important police things at three am what were you doing citizen hands on your car now**

"Are you _texting_ ," Karkat asks, not very impressed, and grabs the phone right out of Dave's hand.

His pointy thumb goes tippytippytip on Dave's keys with pretty impressive speed. Barely scratches the keys at all.

Dave is a little more interested in the way he nudges him so Dave has to back his chair away from the desk a bit, then turns to put his shoulder and half his back against the edge of Dave's chair, snuggled between Dave's knees.

**#fuckyeahpetdemon CAN'T BELIEVE YOU ASSHOLES ARE DISCUSSING MY *HAIR.* OK, ONE ASSHOLE. THANKS @REST OF YOU MEATBAGS FOR NOT ENCOURAGING HIS JACKASSERY.**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon ALSO SEND ME YOUR FAVORITE TYPES OF CANDY. IT'S FOR VERY IMPORTANT AND ENTIRELY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.**

Karkat starts poking and scrolling around, Dave's smartphone cradled in his spiky gauntlet hands. Dave watches him for a minute. He really should see about getting Karkat his own phone. His own tweeting and email accounts, too. Maybe give him the talk on cyber threats, forgeries, and internet perverts... hahaha, nah, he'd figure it out on his own, he's a cynical little bastard.

Giving him the talk anyway would be hilarious. Yeah, okay, he's doing that.

Dave tugs his laptop closer to the edge of the desk and tries to go back to work with a gap between him and the desk and a demon between his legs. Karkat has absently wound one of his wings under and around Dave's calf.

Dave is not paying attention, Dave is not paying attention, Dave is not... "What are you twitching over now?"

"Um." Karkat throws him a glance from underneath his mess of a fringe. "Nothing."

"... Phone, pleez."

Karkat huffs, but hands it over. There's a wall of new messages. Dave scrolls back up a bit.

**#fuckyeahpetdemon @labellesansculotte MY WRITTEN/SPOKEN NAME IS KARKAT. YOU MAY CALL ME KARKAT. IT IS PRONOUNCED KARKAT.**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon @labellesansculotte IF YOU CANNOT PRONOUNCE IT, GO BACK TO KINDERGARTEN, THE ALPHABET IS TOO ADVANCED FOR YOU.**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon @nekomiao0o0 MARSHMALLOWS, BAR NONE.**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon @belloSergio777 RIGHT NOW? UNDER HIS DESK. WHY?**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon @LoLaLaLa UH, NO? I LIKE BEING OUT OF SIGHT, HIS COWORKERS ARE NOSY. IT'S DARK TOO, RESTFUL. GOT PILLOWS FROM THE BREAK ROOM.**

**#fuckyeahpetdemon OKAY, YOU ASSHOLES, WHAT'S WITH THE SECRETARY JOKES.**

After that the tag is full of lame innuendos and people snapping at the assholes making them and "helpful" explanations of what exactly people usually do with other people hidden under their desks.

Dave thought it would be funny to give Karkat a talk on internet perverts. Right now he mostly feels embarrassed to death.

Also a little too warm under the belt.

It doesn't help when Karkat turns to look up at him, chin propped on Dave's knee.

"Okay, I see we have to install a cybernanny for you. You're much too innocent and pure for that naughty crap."

The look Karkat sends him back is cynical enough, but then he rolls his eyes too. "Yeah, sure. That's why I'm not getting why you're oozing lust all over the place suddenly. What an interesting coincidence."

Dave sputters. Oh Jesus asslord buttercup. Did anyone hear him?! He's not speaking loudly, and other people are having conversations around which acts as a kind of brown noise, but he's not whispering either.

Karkat tilts his head a bit, looks up at Dave, expression thoughtful and almost sweet.

"Do you want me to?"

Dave's brain enters the state known as bluescreen of death.

" _No!_ " he hisses, horrified, the second he remembers what words are for. (So, way too fucking late.)

Karkat gives his crotch a pointed look made of 100% disbelief, harvested from the most hardcore atheistic, conspiracy theory-sinking, anti-Santa Claus rainforest of the Himalayas.

Maybe even 110%.

"Are you fucking _crazy_ , not in _public_ , not at _work_ \-- and do you even want, why the fuck would you _want_ , shit --"

Karkat shrugs, looks away. "I'm hungry. You're right here. Why not."

Yeah, that cools him down a little. Dave throws little looks around. No one is visible over their partition... Okay, safe. He looks back down between his thighs.

His dick is still half-hard, and Karkat is still at face level with it.

He seriously, honestly contemplates it. Karkat's shark teeth and the fact that he has never even sucked on Dave's _fingers_ before barely rate a quickly dismissed afterthought. What stops him is --

Not getting found out, exactly, not the embarrassment of being caught in the act (the possibility of being _almost_ found out, of having to pretend all is normal while Karkat has his dick halfway down his throat, that'd almost make him say yes) but... he's not sure. He _likes_ his colleagues. He respects them. It's... he can't really explain it. He doesn't want to bother them like that.

The real no, though, is that as hot as the fantasy is, the reality of Karkat on his knees, "servicing" him, would make the fantasy go sour in his throat.

"I really am hungry," Karkat mutters, staring at the floor, shoulders hunched.

Shit. Argh. Now it's different.

He glances over the partitions. Okay, half of everyone is still out for lunch. Dave extracts himself from the chair and the demon, untucks his button-up shirt artfully. "C'mon. Bathroom break."

He stalks ahead. Karkat pads after him, perked right up. His dick doesn't know what's up, caught at a confused half-mast.

Hossler and Johar aren't in today, so anyone who wants the handicapped stall has no more of a claim than Dave and his demon. He holds the door open, ushers Karkat in, steps in after him. Locks the flimsy door.

All the other stalls are empty. Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

Why does he still feel nervous just about every time it happens? Shouldn't it have gotten better by now?

No, it did get better, a little bit, and when they're just lying around in bed listening to music or the rain or whatever and suddenly nibbles happen it's not really awkward anymore to take himself in hand and give himself long, lazy strokes as Karkat presses against his back. Right now, though...

He stares down at his demon, who stares back, and wow he's not sure about the mild degree of sordid that having someone on all fours on a public bathroom floor infuses this with. Even if it looks clean enough today.

"Right," Karkat says, "sit on the toilet."

"Um."

He glowers up at him. "Sit."

Dave steps around him and sits on the lowered cover, a little startled. Does he want to straddle Dave's lap? The wall will make this a smidge awkward, but he can --

Oh huh. Hands on his knees.

Dave could also do with a handjob. His pulse speeds up a little as he watches those raptor claws make their way up his thighs. Karkat isn't very good at slow and sensual -- hard to be when his hands don't feel what he's doing -- but he tries; he reproduces the long gliding movements he enjoys the most, the way Dave touches his own velvety thighs.

He glowers at Dave's fly. Dave undoes it obediently, before his buttons get sheared off. The smooth outside curve of a claw runs up his dick through his underwear; he chokes a little as he fishes himself out. He needs, he reminds himself, to keep breathing slow, quiet, he needs to not make noise. Someone could walk in any time.

Two segmented, hard-shelled fingers curl cautiously around the base of his shaft, guide his dick away from his belly.

Karkat leans in, dark lips parted. Dave's breath hitches like someone just kneed him in the stomach.

"Wait wait wait -- you're not going to -- Karkat?"

"I'm not going to bite," Karkat growls back, and leans the rest of the way in to give his shaft a cautious lick.

Dave almost doesn't notice the pinpricks of Karkat's quills on his belly.

(He does notice them a little; he smoothes them back, rests his hand there. All the half-panicked thoughts from a second ago sound as if there's a wall in the way, muting them.)

A lick and a lick and another lick, slow and measured, testing. His tongue is so, so warm, just a little bit raspy, not to cat levels by far but a tiny little bit anyway, a bit long, tapering. He leaves a damp trail up Dave's dick that dries under his hot breath.

It's a fucking tease. Dave is fully prepared to sit here another three hours while Karkat maps the entire contours of Mount Strider.

He's gonna need a little more stimulation in a minute though. His hand inches toward his balls.

Slap. Karkat glowers. "No. I'm doing it. Suggest shit if you want, but otherwise sit there and shut up."

The surge of arousal that blooms in his belly and races up his spine forces him to lock his throat, still his lungs, so he won't make more noise than this first startled little gasp, so he won't whimper. His face has gone hot, his ears burn.

Karkat blinks up at him, as if he _oh right, he can tell_ , and then--

He smiles.

It's just a crooked little thing of a smile, pleased, not really smug. Dave wants to kiss him so badly. Karkat makes a little humming, purring noise in his throat and licks a stripe up his cock instead.

Ngh. Okay. Yeah. Kissing is a thing that can happen later.

"It tastes mostly like skin," Karkat muses. "Bit salty."

Dave whimpers. "Please do not comment on the taste. Please. As a favor to me."

"I just thought it'd be more gross. Shut up."

He nips the inside of Dave's thigh through his slacks. Dave's dick jumps a little. So does the rest of him. Oh fuck yes, teeth. "Uh, and do you know about the _no fucking teeth_ thing. Because I'm not sure what you know about this, I should have supervised your internet time more, and--"

Karkat looks up long enough to roll his eyes, and nips his thigh again. "Yeah, that's not common sense at all."

Dave would keep talking -- he can keep talking through so many things he really should shut up during, it's both a blessing and a curse -- only then Karkat takes the tip of his dick in his mouth, black lips wrapped around his shaft just under the head, tongue pressed flat against him.

And then he looks up at him, burning red eyes under black tousled locks, and he _smirks_ around Dave's cock, and he curls up his lip to bare his fangs. The head of Dave's cock is nestled on a wet, warm, very red tongue, lower lip made to pout underneath, and over it are lined all these bear trap teeth.

Karkat is a fucking asshole. Also, there is something very wrong with Dave's libido.

"No need to rub it in," he mutters as his dick pulses. He thinks he sees, oh _hell_ is that precum about to drop on Karkat's tongue, what if the taste--

Karkat wraps his lips around him again, and laughs a little. Dave's eyes close of their own volition.

"You could," he tries to say, "if you felt like it," but it sounds wrong, like he's giving Karkat permission to do what he wants when what's so awesome about it is _Karkat is doing what he wants_. "Please?"

Karkat is sucking on his dick, not too hard, not too deep, more interested in testing how things work than in ravaging Dave's body. "Hmm?"

"Your hand -- bit tighter? Please?" _'You don't have to'_ dies on his tongue.

Karkat hums thoughtfully around his dick. Dave dies a little. He pets his hair, nervously, trying to encourage him or change his mind or whatever, and he waits.

"Hm. No."

Dave whines. His hips twitch, try to roll. He lets his head rock back, bump against the wall. Ow. He bumps his head again, deliberately. Damn it. "Okay." Okay, whatever Karkat wants.

And then his hand tightens anyway, moves up and down in cautious halves of an inch -- and a good thing they don't go faster or farther too because Karkat's hand doesn't give like flesh would, and it hurts a tiny little bit in that way Dave's body actually likes somehow, what is wrong with his nervous system, seriously.

"Oh fuck, thank you--"

Someone walks by. Dave freezes, and Karkat doesn't stop sucking and suddenly those little wet noises are so, _so_ loud -- but they don't walk in. The relief is so intense Dave slumps against the wall, all limbs loose -- slides a little farther into Karkat's mouth, who gags, and then he feels the point of teeth grazing him and whimpers. He can't even tense again, he just -- if Karkat wants to bite, well then, bite away.

He doesn't, but he pulls off, laps at the part where his teeth pressed in, even though that didn't really hurt, before swallowing Dave back down. He's graduated to little clicky noises, like a motor trying to start.

"I need -- up and down -- please, fuck." He mimes with his hand. He has no more words to describe. He can't can't _can't_ guide Karkat's head down, it's his show today not Dave's show _he's totally fine with it_ , yes, he is, totally fine.

Sexiest bit of torture, like. Ever. But he's really going to need more than those teases if he wants to ever come; the longer they're here the more likely they'll get caught, and people might theoretically understand that he _has_ to feed his demon, but... But.

"What if I didn't want to," Karkat muses, lips against his dick.

"Then I'd get blue balls and it would hurt like a bitch and I couldn't feed you for a while?" Dave blurts out, which he's sure is the wrong answer, but Karkat just looks up at him again and snickers. He is so fucking cute when he smiles. Or smirks. Or basically any expression that isn't a glare. No, his glares are hot actually, though also cute somehow. But yes, smiles, not enough, love to see more of, and Dave is totally mooning at his demon's face like a complete idiot.

"You're the most idiotic piece of talking meat I have ever heard of," Karkat replies, but he's still smirking, so Dave just smiles back. He has a vague feeling he looks goofy as fuck.

After that Karkat takes him in his mouth again and starts bobbing up and down, slow and cautious at first as he figures out how to keep his lips in place, and Dave stops thinking about what his own face looks like, because he's busy staring at the ceiling. It's an awesome ceiling, like wow, all those tiles on it. Karkat doesn't take him very deep, but he picks up some speed, slowly; his hand is nice and tight around the root of his dick and his other hand is prickling Dave's knee through the cloth with all its claws.

Dave's pleasure rises in twitches and sudden starts; he has time to spare a thought for a quick _oh, hey, with my luck, isn't it time I got interrupted_ , and then he's choking on air and pleasure, fingers forced apart so he won't tear off a fistful of black hair and spines as the rest of him clenches through the height of his orgasm.

It takes him half a minute, and the realization that his dick is wet and cold, to blink his eyes open and wince. "Oh shit, sorry, I forgot to warn--"

Karkat is grimacing as he spits on a bit of toilet paper in his hand, but he spares the time to roll his eyes at him. "I can feel your pleasure, asshole, if I couldn't tell when you're about to blow by now I'd be the sorriest demon in all the planes of existence and some that were invented just for the occasion."

"Thar she blows," Dave mumbles. Karkat arches his eyebrows. "Nuthin'."

He tucks himself back in, still reeling, gets up on shaky legs to let Karkat throw the toilet paper away.

"So um, can we spend like ten minutes wasting the taxpayer's dollars while I cuddle you on the job. I have a mighty need."

Karkat looks up at him. For once his expression is hard to read. Calculating? Wistful? Something else entirely? It's too subtle.

"I don't care about the taxpayers, but someone has been waiting outside the bathroom door for the last two minutes."

Huh.

Drowning in a toilet bowl is a thing that can actually happen, right? Someone should test this important security issue for the good of the public.

His face is burning still, but not with arousal anymore. Dave takes in a deep, bracing breath, goes to wash his hands and avoid his own eyes in the mirror, and make his much too slow and unsteady way to the exit.

Of course then Karkat reaches the door first.

"Oh. It's you."

Not any more of a clue. Dave tells himself if it's Captain Egbert it will actually be a good thing. Or a not as bad as it could have been thing. Yes. That.

He walks out, somehow. Jade purses her mouth at him.

Behind his awesome poker face Dave discreetly boggles at his partner. "What the heck are you doing h--"

"I guess with their weird locks bathroom stalls are hard to hang socks on."

Dave's face burns a little harder. " _What are you doing here Jade Harley you were supposed to be resting at home._ "

She takes his wrist, pulls him along; he walks after her, purely out of habit. She seems in a hurry, eyes bright, steps bouncing. She was so drained last night... this morning. Can she really be fine already just because she slept in until noon? "Like it matters! HR only gave me a free half-day for the summoning, the stingy assholes, and I don't have a lot of sick leave left, so I had Feferi boost me a bit."

"Isn't that like taking your own blood so you can give yourself a blood transfusion so you won't be dizzy from the blood loss?" Karkat asks, frowning in puzzlement, as he trots by their side. Jade is apparently getting them to the elevator.

"It's okay!" she tells Karkat, and ushers them in. "We'll just go clubbing tonight, Fef and I, find a cute boy to bring back home."

She's still rocking on her toes as she hits the button. Hm. Detention and Interrogation room level. What is going on? Dave's brain is starting to defuzz enough from the orgasm and panic to start wondering really hard.

"Jade, what's going on?"

"Waiiit aaaand seeeee," she sings, grinning brightly. "It's so what the fuck, I just want to see your face. I couldn't see mine when they told me!" She punches Dave in the shoulder -- not very hard, so she must be happy. "And then I had to waste five minutes hunting you down! You'd better hope they haven't started interrogating. Though I doubt it, they were still flailing around when I came in, I don't know if they even knew where to put him."

Wow, okay. Something significant, then.

Jade cracks open the observation room door and suddenly Karkat, bored and loose-winged Karkat, jerks like someone ran a live wire through him and eels through before her, hip-checking her aside.

"Hey!" Dave protests, and pushes in with Jade through the doorway.

Inside there's Captain Egbert and Arne Revere, John interrupted by their entrance in the middle of a quiet, serious discussion with them and Captain Maguire from Robbery, three other detectives gathered by the window who apparently have nothing better to do -- it's going to be really cramped.

It's already cramped enough when Karkat shoulders the detectives out of his way and stands on his back legs, leaning heavily on his hands on the one-way-mirror's ledge.

"Who the hell even _caught_ him," Karkat says in a low, strangely intense, almost offended way. A few cricket clicks escape his throat.

"No one," John replies, voice lowered so it won't resonate through the mirror, almost casual otherwise. "He walked himself in."

Almost.

When Dave makes himself a space at Karkat's back he doesn't know if he's surprised or not to recognize the man lounging on his precariously balanced chair looking bored out of his mind as Spades Slick.

Jade elbows herself a space at Dave's side, grins up. "Bricks?"

"Shat." Dave swallows. Shiiiiit. Hello adrenaline. What is going on, something _massive_ has to be going on. He will laugh himself into the hospital should anyone try to tell him Slick had a change of heart regarding his criminal lifestyle. "Any of his buddies with him? We might have enough for a wall soonish."

"Nope, he came alone." John shakes his head in disbelief. "He just walked right up to the front desk, said, hey, I'm Spades Slick, get someone to put me in custody. Let 'em put the handcuffs on and lead him away easy as you please. My prank alarms are at defcon one."

"Sounds legit," Dave replies. Between him and the mirror Karkat looks still, but his wing membranes are vibrating, tense like drum skin.

Dave rests a hand on his demon's shoulder, heavy, more to remind him to keep himself in check than for support; even from the back Karkat looks like he wishes he could do truly unreasonable things and Dave doesn't want him to try to go against orders. He's... not entirely sure that Karkat wouldn't try something, and it's disturbing that there is even a doubt.

"It does beg the question," says Captain Egbert, "of exactly how long he plans to stay in custody..."

John's eyes narrow and his chin sets mulishly. "Well, I hope he didn't leave a soufflé on. Okay, I'm going."

"I'm going too."

Everyone in the room stares at Karkat. Karkat is only staring at John. He still has a hand on the ledge for balance, and his back looks a bit too arched, like he's straining his muscles to stay at face height. It does give him a different presence than usual.

Dave isn't sure what to think. He glances at Captain Egbert and Captain Maguire, but Egbert Senior just looks thoughtful and shoots John's pointed questioning look back at him. 'What do I do?' 'I don't know, son, what do you want to do?'

"Uh. Karkat. You seem kind of weirdly attached to the dude," John says. "We don't even know if you'd be trying to help him escape if you found a way."

"I wouldn't," Karkat replies; he's frowning, but it's like for once he's working on not growling at people's stupidity, he sounds more sober and resolute than annoyed. "But don't take me at my word, make him order me."

"Hm. That answers the why not, but not the why. Why would you be needed in that room? You can watch from here."

Dave watches him hesitate, there, open his mouth, close it, bite his black lip. And then he frowns, lifts his chin. "He liked me," he says, almost forcefully, like he's trying to convince himself. "It might not change jack shit, but what does it hurt to try?"

Stares. Reactions range from baffled confusion -- the non-Demon Crimes peeps -- to watchful interest, but all seem intent to let the John-Karkat staring match go on.

Jade breaks the silence by snickering. "Wow. Good demon, bad cop, there's a variation I've never heard before!"

John grins, sudden, all teeth out. "Heh. Depends on Dave! You want in, buddy?"

Dave considers it. Does he want his demon alone in a room with Spades Slick... hahahaha no. (Does he want to veto it entirely, when Karkat wants it so much? ... no. Well. Yes, but insecurity is a shitty motivation, so no.) "Sure, I can be the wall-holding cop. Keeping y'all safe with the strength of my back muscles."

He follows John and Karkat into the corridor, stops them for a quick list of orders -- no helping Slick get free in any way, intel goes in and not out, etcetera -- and then they're unlocking the interrogation room door and walking in.

"Jack 'Spades' Slick! Leader of the notorious Midnight Crew for the last thirteen years, wow, I was still in school, the normal school not the police school. I'm impressed!" John dumps his file on the table. It's thick enough it makes a nice amount of noise. "Detective-Summoner Egbert, a surprise to meet you today."

Slick looks anything but impressed. He rakes him with a quick assessing glance, and then his dark, heavy-lidded gaze travels onto Dave and Karkat in turn. Dave goes to lean against a bit of wall by the mirror, so he and John will have the man caught in their crossfire, and pretends he doesn't see the tiny flicker of surprise on the criminal's face upon seeing his demon.

"Don't bother playing up the inexperienced angle, brat," he says, still balancing precariously on the back legs of his chair. "How's your old man doing?"

"Pretty well, thanks. I don't know if I should feel honored by your trust in my abilities or insulted by your insinuation of nepotism!" John says, falsely chagrined.

Spades snorts, doesn't answer.

"And these are Detective-Summoner Strider and Knight Vantas, I'm told you've met."

"Mnh."

John puts his hands on the table, leans in, shoulders pulled in, still pretending friendly. "So. What brings you?"

Slick looks him up and down, and pointedly rocks in his chair.

"Because I'm sad to tell you that cupcake day was yesterday."

Dave doesn't sigh visibly, though he wants to. They're settling in for a long stretch of Slick being silent and bored and John trying to annoy answers out of him, even though everyone knows he's going to say stuff in the end, even if it's just a cover story. It's a pissing contest, is all.

"Jack?" Karkat says, all quiet and oddly subdued. Dave's stomach executes a complicated squeeze-and-drop maneuver.

The crime lord and Dave's demon stare at each other. The man is inscrutable.

Must be some truth to Karkat's belief that he likes him, though, because then he opens his mouth.

"Got wind that some dickwad was gonna frame me for their shit. 'd like to see them try now."

Dave blinks, watches John's eyebrows go way up.

"Whoa, dude, what kind of crime is it going to be that you don't think it'll match on your rap sheet? Because, I mean, with everything we have on you so far we can put you away for anywhere between two and three hundred years, if we go with consecutive sentences."

Slick gives a short, annoyed shrug. "I'd rather have a hot poker shoved up my ass than let 'em get away with fucking me over that deep. Plus that shit carries a capital sentence. Rather earn my own."

Dave doesn't even need to see the guys on the other side of the mirror to be able to tell they're all bright-eyed and hunting-tense and hanging onto the asshole's every word. Dave knows, because so is he.

John nods to himself. "Yeah, okay, I will take you at your word, with trust and faith in the inner goodness of my fellow man." He says it sincerely enough that Dave snorts. "So. What's that mean thing they're accusing you wrongly of?"

"First things first." Slick balances his chair back on four feet; it lands with a little thump. "Not Northampton or Selridge. I don't fancy having to shank my way to the chow every single day."

John purses his lips. Of course, they've heard about Selridge's rep, but Northampton is pretty okay as prisons go, not too overcrowded and hardly a riot to be seen. "What makes them more shank-happy than other prisons?"

"Nothing." Slick shrugs. "Number of guards on the take make it easier to get away with."

John's eyes narrow; even Dave's twitch a bit. Corruption is a problem everywhere, but coming from an out and out criminal it's not something any cop likes to hear, fuck.

"What does it cost, John?" Karkat asks, and drags a chair out to sit on, glaring at John like he's daring him to step off. "Do you want him alive to see a trial or what?"

Dave snorts quietly. If Karkat believes Slick is planning to let it go to a trial then he's the only one in the room. But they can't show anymore of a divided front, so he doesn't say it, just throws Karkat what he hopes is a sufficiently quelling glance. Karkat refuses to look at him.

"Don't worry," John eventually says, to Slick, ignoring Karkat. "Only the best incarceration experience for our favorite VIP. Solitary work for you?"

Slick shrugs, again. "Whatever. The crazymaking demon spree."

Dave blinks. John blinks. Karkat tilts his head. "The terror spells?"

"Mnh. You got like ten of them so far, right." Slick's brow knits; his facial scars pull at his eyelid and at the corner of his lip in a mildly disturbing way. "That's aggravated assault and I don't fucking know how many cases of murder and soul damage and erasure by way of demon. I'm not frying for that shit."

Officially, they've got eight. One case is confusing enough with the victim's psych and drug history that they're not sure whether to count it in, and they might not have found them all. "Right," Dave says, and knocks on the mirror. "Someone get Burnett down here."

John looks at Dave, nods toward the door. Dave follows him, crooks his fingers for Karkat to follow, which he does, reluctantly.

"Back in a minute."

John closes the door behind them, and they stand in the corridor and stare at each other. (Karkat shifts his weight impatiently and throws half-longing, half-irritated looks at John's hand, still resting on the door handle.)

"Believe him?" Dave asks, and doesn't offer his opinion first because it's John's case that he's been nursing for two years, not his.

"Weirdly enough, yes." John frowns at the floor, thoughtful. "It's not his style at _all_. He'll get one of his buddies to get a demon to knock down a wall, if necessary, they're not as hard to procure as explosives,  but mindfucking people? He'd rather just stab them."

"Could be he got inspired by someone else."

"Could be," John echoes, but he doesn't believe it. S'okay, neither does Dave. "Just one more question now. Because, you know, the frame wouldn't work any other way, what with it being a stupidly easy thing to disprove, but. _Spades Slick_ is a _summoner_?!"

"Oh yes," says Kankri as he trots down the corridor, Rose power-walking at his side, heels clacking.

She has no makeup on, makes her look washed out, half a ghost, and her eyes are two large bruises, but her teeth are bared in an anticipatory smile.

"Hello, partner! Cracking cases open without me?"

John laughs and beams back. "Gee, sorry! Wow, Kankri, nice look."

They come to a stop and Rose smiles and nods at John. Kankri sits on his haunches, back straight, tail coiled behind him -- not on his toes like Karkat does but on the whole length of his lower legs from claws to that backward-knee part that would probably be a heel on any normally proportioned human.

"Kankri woke me up in the middle of a rather sound and much-needed sleep and insisted we needed to be here--"

"And so we do, I assure--"

"--So here we are. Now... What is this about Spades Slick being a summoner?"

Karkat grunts, points a thumb at the door over his shoulder. "Spades Slick. Walked in. Is in here. Is a summoner. Why is that even any kind of fucking surprise."

John huffs, blows bangs off his own forehead. "Because in all the years he's been around making a nuisance of himself he has never, _ever_ used magic, is why."

"It was not a matter of a lack of ability, I can assure you," Kankri says, eyebrows arched, tone oddly pinched. Karkat's lip curls up over his teeth and he puts both hand on Kankri's tail, pinning it to the ground, and pivots on one foot to plant his other foot in his ribs. Shove. Unable to catch himself with his tail, Kankri ends up on his ass.

He's still sputtering his outrage when the door to the observation room opens and Captain Egbert leans out. "Detectives," he says mildly, the way he used to say 'children' when they were preteens making a mess of his house. John and Rose stop smiling immediately; Dave's spine straightens up a bit. "Detective Burnett is en route. Detective Egbert, it might be time to go back in."

John gives a sheepish little smile and starts turning the handle. Dave nudges Karkat away from Kankri to let Kankri get back up and moves toward the door as well. The Captain looks at Rose.

"Detective Lalonde, you and Kankri should join us. It'll be a tight fit, but..."

Dave is barely through the door, so he can't see Rose or Kankri anymore, and at this angle he doesn't think Slick sees more than a trailing tail and the points of blood-red wings past the doorjamb.

The Captain's voice should be slightly muffled as well, but.

"Hey. Vantas. Wait a sec."

Karkat perks up, steps inside, little wings up. "Yes?"

Slick only spares him the quickest glance. "Not you, kid. The other one."

One part of Dave's brain notes the way Karkat flinches, like he stepped on a lego and didn't somehow crush it to splinters with his armored weight, the way he deflates. Another part -- "Okay, how the fuck do you know _that_."

Dave grits his teeth as he realizes he's gone from bored to _not fucking amused_ , at least to someone who'd know him. He's tense all over and it takes him a second for his mind to catch up with his instinct. No one should make the link between Kankri and Karkat (Vantas, who knew they were both named that before the summoning?) and no one should know what Kankri looks like, unless they were watching him being embodied (the police station roof is at a bad angle from the nearby buildings and for anything farther away the summoning was throwing off so much interference a camera should have captured nothing but static), or unless they have a spy. He shouldn't know a thing about Dave's sister's demon, about Karkat's not-brother.

Spades Slick looks at him, cold and patient and absolutely not impressed.

Outside there's Kankri's tail slithering out of view like a startled lizard, a bout of hurried whispering. "Ah -- Master -- if you will allow me a modicum of self-determination--"

"Naturally," Rose answers, "if you will allow me to ask..." and trails off suggestively.

Silence. Dave keeps glaring at Slick, who keeps not giving a shit.

"Stop being a fucking pansy," Karkat snaps toward the door, and stomps back to his chair, which he drags out pointedly and climbs into, growling under his breath. Slick snorts quietly.

"Might as well ask a pig to fly." The glance he gives John and Dave is not subtle.

Karkat resettles his spines with a determined rattle and turns back to Slick, chin up. "Well, if _he_ doesn't want to talk to you--"

"Very well," Kankri is saying from the doorway, crackling with resentment. It's the closest Dave has heard him getting to a real growl so far, the same inhuman echoes Karkat throws around like breathing creaking quietly underneath his words.

Meanwhile John holds the handle with the look of someone who wonders where he went from detective in charge to doorman. "If anyone who wants to come in _is_ in...?"

Rose follows her demon, throwing her partner a little apologetic nod, and John sighs as he closes behind her.

"Ah well, it was messy from the start."

"So," Slick says, as he looks Kankri up and down. "Doesn't suit you at all."

"My embodied appearance is none of your concern. If you cannot wrap your primitive brain around the concept that I am still the same person inside, then... Well, I won't be extremely surprised, disappointed as that makes me."

"If I ask you how you and Mister Slick met..." Rose starts.

"I will have to regretfully inform you of the existence of a preexisting confidentiality clause. My apologies."

"Of course." She smiles, turns to Slick. "So when did you last summon Kankri, Mister Slick?"

Dave... blinks.

Because yeah okay. Uh. Okay. Slick is a summoner. He knows Karkat and Kankri. Kankri especially is liberally referring to a previous encounter. It's pretty easy as deductions go, but it just won't mesh in his brain.

Slick... smiles, if one could call it that. It's just a shadow of a smirk, and it doesn't stay long, but it's clear as day; the asshole is laughing at them. "Never did summon him."

Rose's eyes narrow, but she doesn't call him on it. Shit. Did Terezi _confirm_? Okay, what the hell. Maybe he knew Kankri's previous summoner. Yeah. Makes sense. And Karkat... well, Karkat had never been summoned before Dave, so Spades Slick can't be it. But then why the fuck -- argh, argh, argh. Dave is starting to get really annoyed at this stupid mystery.

"I was under the impression that you wanted something definite, Mister Slick. My apologies but I do not think my Master has a whole day to spend trading idle barbs and pleasantries, and I, personally, am alas not in a position to offer you anything of my own will any longer."

"Mnh. Your Master, right." He looks at Rose then, measuring her up. Rose smiles back, perfectly poised, perfectly cold. "'d take it as a favor if you could get your demon to scan the prison guards, figure out if they've got any allegiances or money flows where they shouldn't."

Rose's smile widens a little, becomes almost pleasant. "Where should he be tracking these back to?"

No answer.

"Oh well, I figure we will find out shortly. It's interesting that you know Kankri would do well with this type of Seeing. Allegiances, flows..."

Kankri and Karkat grit their teeth the exact same way, Dave notices.

"If I may offer some advice," Kankri growls, eyes gone to slits, "make sure his containment cell is rated to withstand a strong Level Four."

... Shit. Okay. Shit. Spades Slick is a Level Four summoner.

A strong one.

Who never summons where anyone can see him.

For the love of fuck, _why_?

(And if he never does use it, who found out and is now using it against him?)

At least the suggestion seems to have annoyed Slick, from the way he glares daggers at Kankri. Kankri is glaring back, chin up, starting to puff up like a cat.

The door opens, and Burnett walks in, folder under her arm. She arches an eyebrow at the number of people in the room, and steps past Rose and Kankri's mess of tail and wings to place herself with her back to the mirror, next to Dave. "Detective-Summoner Burnett," she tells Slick. "Captain Egbert briefed me. Now tell me how you're linked to my investigation."

The mobster sighs like he thinks shit is getting tedious. Dave feels sorry for him, no, really. "I told 'em already. Someone's gonna try to frame me for your crazies. Make it look like I summoned that thing."

John nods. "And as we've already wondered... what makes you so vulnerable to it?"

Slick growls, then, short and irritated, and his fingers twitch. Dave knows he has no knives left on him -- he seriously hopes, if the officers haven't frisked him properly Dave is going to _kill them_ \-- but he still tenses, starts nudging at Aradia.

"The aspect," Slick eventually grumbles, and sinks in his chair a little bit. Burnett relaxes faintly, not very much but just enough to make a point.

"I have it narrowed down to Mind, Heart or Rage," she offers, which makes Dave twitch but he supposes there's not much this would affect. Likely she's narrowed it down farther than that.

"Yeah. That." He sucks on his teeth, prods at something with his tongue, like he doesn't give a fuck. Dave is pulling for Burnett to bludgeon him with her files. They sure are thick enough. "I'm told I ping most demons' radars as Rage. Wouldn't know better unless you looked pretty hard."

Burnett purses her lips. "But all those demons are somehow wrong, and you are not."

Karkat was so still, Dave almost forgot he was sitting there, up until he shoves himself up and his claws embed themselves in the table. "Jack--!"

"Shut _up_ , brat."

"But you _know_ \--"

Dave doesn't get it, doesn't get any of it, the way Spades Slick turns to look at his demon, who has never been incarnated or even summoned before, looks at him like Karkat annoys him but he's -- he's -- they're on the same side somehow.

Not only like Karkat thinks it but like Slick does too.

"They can only play that card against me," he rasps, "if I don't play it first. You dig?"

He gives Dave's demon's head a backhanded tap, a bit too harsh to be friendly, not anything like an attack. Karkat takes it. Karkat is appalled and furious and lost, stares at Burnett and at Kankri and at John and Rose.

Slick looks at Dave. "Get him out of here. Too much fucking noise."

Dave's jaw tenses. It'd be good advice if it came from anyone else. Karkat might have helped getting the discussion started, but now? He's just getting in people's way. (Dave doesn't even fucking know how it doesn't count as interfering in Slick's favor.)

Still, it is good advice, and then Burnett turns to him and goes, "I think we're too many for a room this small," and yeah, they are, and he's not bringing anything to the conversation, so.

He shoves away from the wall. "Karkat, come with me." He twists a thread of power in the words; he's not in the mood to argue.

Karkat leaves his chair with a sullen thump and follows; Dave closes the door behind them and they're alone in the empty corridor, and he could lead them to the observation room but...

"I think you need to tell me now," he says quietly, "how you know him. I've been trying to give you your space -- your life, right, I'm not gonna put my nose in your shit, but looks like your shit is on a collision course with our investigations." He turns to face his demon. Karkat stands in the middle of the corridor, a few steps behind him, looking lost. "I need to know now."

"How I ... know him?"

He seems not to know what to do with that question. Dave reformulates. He'll reformulate as many times as it takes. "Where did you meet?"

Karkat sneers. "You were _there_ the first time we met, asshole."

... So...

He's not asking the right questions, only confirming stuff he already deduced.

He already knows the shape of what he wants to know, anyway; it's just the details now.

"Kankri knew him before, though."

Karkat looks away. "Who Kankri hangs out with isn't any of my fucking business, and I most certainly did not keep myself informed. We weren't in any kind of contact before you incarnated me."

But that's derailing, that's not what... "Rage is a pretty rare affinity, huh," he muses. "Pretty incriminating if it matches. But he says he's not, and there's that way he _gets_ to both you and Kankri somehow. So."

So.

"He's Blood, isn't he."

Karkat hunches his shoulders, looks away.

Dave sort of guessed a little while ago, but saying it...

Blood Aspect is so vanishingly rare. Rose made enquiries, but in the whole of North America there is no other known Blood demon. South? Maybe, their paperwork sucks and they don't classify things quite the same way. Europe, there was a rumor they had one, a half century ago.

A _human_ turns up with it, and he turns out to be Spades Fucking Slick, mobster extraordinaire. That is so far past irony it just goes straight back to being ridiculous.

Karkat is still hunched small and defensive -- defending himself from Dave. Defending Slick. Some guy he keeps saying he's never met.

The earlier bathroom escapades seem a hundred miles away.

"I don't get it," he admits quietly.

Karkat looks up, lips pinched, eyes wet. "He's a _Knight_ ," he says, and then Dave figures out demons can cry.

He goes to Karkat and crouches, pulls him close, hugs him. Quills prickle his neck. Whatever.

"He's -- he's a Knight, he _should_ be a Knight, only he's all -- twisted inside and _cracked_ and, and. It hurts. I keep seeing what he could -- what he _should_ be, and I just want to -- and I _can't_."

Karkat burrows his face in the crook of Dave's shoulder. It's wet.

"He should _protect_ and he's not,and what the fuck happened, it's not right, it's -- he'd be so _perfect_."

He whispers it in Dave's neck. Tears keep coming, slow and regular and warm.

Dave tries to think up a good joke to himself about forbidden romance and sundered soulmates and he can't.

He's got nothing good to say right now anyway. (Sorry he's not yours.) Nothing he should say. (Sorry I'm not Blood.)

He guides Karkat's arms around his neck and picks him up. His back twangs and his thighs ache. Whatever.

When he's in the car he texts Captain Egbert about how sorry he is to bail mid-day and whether they can email him things to work from home with and if it would be possible to get Jade to bring him any missing paperwork.

Karkat curls on the seat next to him, and sighs all quiet and wet and shuddery as Dave runs his fingers through his messy hair.


	15. Chapter 15

**From: Jade**   
**Subject: (none)**   
**Message: ummm dave why is there a dildo in your cubicle? :/**

\--

Karkat starts dragging himself out of his funk by seven PM and six minutes. Dave knows, because that's when the mezzanine comes down with a case of quiet, droning buzzing.

Fuck Jade for bringing it along. (Fuck himself for asking her to, after mucho flailing and justifications he can't even tell if she bought or what.)

Seven PM and twelve minutes. "I am going to kill Rose," Dave announces to the living room at large in a pleasantly conversational tone. You should be polite with inanimate objects and empty rooms, after all, you never know what random undetected magic leaks can do to their hostility levels. "I am going to kill her until she is dead, and then I am going to magically transmogrify myself to Life, revive her, and kill her again. Somehow."

"Who are you even talking to, douchewhine?"

Oh hey no more buzzy noise. Hallelujah. Dave looks up from the paperwork and laptop on his coffee table; Karkat is peering down at him over the platform's edge.

The underside of his eyes look a little bruised, the yellow darker, more orangeish. Might be the light.

"The floor, I think. Good brave floor. Should appreciate him more. He'll feel all neglected."

Karkat doesn't even dignify that with a response, just snorts quietly to himself and disappears. Dave sighs and bends back to his work.

Bzzzzzz.

 _Note to self_ , he thinks, _do not headdesk on laptop, laptop is expensive shit to replace. Do NOT headdesk on laptop..._

Aradia grins in the back of his head. Dave pouts, since there's no one to see him, utterly sincere jutting lip and all.

_Would you even want to be Life if you could?_

_Nah, it'd be boring as fuck. Sorry, Strider, no more daring rescues for you! Sit here and fix all the dumbasses who get to have actual adventures._

Seriously, poor Jane. Dave doesn't understand how she can stand it. Her sense of duty is just way too overdeveloped for her own good, is what he's always said.

Okay he might not have said it much but he's always thought it. Yep.

BzzzZZZzzzzzzz.

_Wonder how a Knight of Life would fight, though? Wow that is some fascinating shit. Would they like just mundanely kill people, or use their own life as a weapon somehow? Fuel for their attacks? That'd be just as efficient as a Seer of Void, holy fuck someone call the press, we figured out the most useless superpower bar none. The Guinness Book of World Records is all over that shit like an armada of shit-starved flies, buzzing up a storm across the horizon and aahh shit._

_I think it's just Karkat's dildo!_ Aradia says, mock-innocent.

Dave thinks she's right and he hates her a lot. _I think how about someone kill me instead. Rose is too far away. My only hope of revenge left is for her guilt to do her in._

Bzz bzz bzz.

Where is he even running that thing, Dave wonders despite himself. Up his leg? His neck? Maybe against his little nubhorns, maybe the spines along his back. Is he ticklish anywhere but his wing membranes? Does he like it yet, or is he still making his doubtful face with the furrowed brows and the squinting upper-eyes?

BzzzZZzzZZzzZZzz. Zzzz.

Has he tried lodging the thing between his long velociraptor toes yet?

Shit. Dave bets/wonders/wishes Karkat is touching himself all over. He wants him to go hey this is my body wow that's not bad after all, oh hey I have shoulder blades and heels and palms and all that good shit. Is this a sternum? My good sir, this sounds positively excellent.

He hates that Rose had such a horribly awesome idea.

Zz zz zz zzzzzzzz.

Or an awesomely horrible one. Probably it's both.

Okay, he's got work to do here.

It's weird how much harder it is to concentrate at home than in the middle of a full room with a dozen coworkers moving around.

Granted he spent his first hour or so running his fingers through Karkat's hair as Karkat soaked his pants leg through with demon tears. That was pretty distracting.

They didn't burn or anything. Dave almost expected they would. But no, just salty water, like a human's. He wonders if they have any magical properties. He could try to sell them as knockoff unicorn. _Dark_ unicorn. Just sob in this tiny flask if you don't mind, Karkat, it's going to your smartphone fund.

As with all of his powerfully organic experiences so far, Karkat really did not enjoy crying. Dave didn't enjoy it much more than he did; when Karkat decided to disappear upstairs because his shame was overtaking his need for comfort Dave caught himself feeling almost glad.

Bleh.

Fuck Spades Slick.

_Latula?_

_Yeah, whassup?_

_If you found a Knight of Mind summoner -- no, never mind, it's a stupid question and I'm stupid for thinking it._

She laughs, almost gently. _No, I wouldn't trade up. Another Knight of Mind would rock the sick mind shield already, they wouldn't need my bangin' chops at all. Mellow out, flameo._

_... Can you go back to calling me firetruck. Please. As a favor to me._

_Aww. Firecrackz? Tick Tock Bombz? Hm, Bombzor._

_Firetruck is cool. Don't you change on me now, I won't know what to do with myself anymore._

He doesn't send her anything about the gratitude and relief he feels. He knows she can tell.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

"God _damn_ it."

Zz zz. Blessed silence. "Are you talking to me now?"

"Yeah, this time around I think I am. Hey, wanna watch some TV? Play a game? Man I've got to get my old gaming console from Bro, you'd probably like it."

Karkat's head pops out again. "I thought you were working," he says, suspicious.

"I... am? Was? I need a break? Oh hey it's pretty much dinner time. Want me to teach you how to cook?" Karkat makes a doubtful face; Dave hurries to add, "The prize is that you then know how to cook."

A moue. "Would I even be allowed to do that without supervision?"

"Hm." Dave considers it. "Once I'm satisfied that you won't waste shit right and left or burn down the building, probably. We'll negotiate."

Seems like a good thing for Karkat not to be utterly dependent on him for sustenance, anyway, even though at the start he's likely to give up eating with Dave entirely to go off on his own, which would suck because Dave got used to having his meals in his company instead of the TV's. Maybe he'll overeat just because he can, too.

Maybe Karkat will start cooking for two... Haha, yeah, him deliberately being nice and helpful to Dave just because? Not very likely. But anyway. Dave piles up his papers and moves his laptop to a corner, and drags himself on his feet.

Does he even have any perishables... Nope. He does have cheese though. Okay, mac 'n cheese it is. He needs to start with the basics anyway if he's teaching Karkat. (It has nothing to do with the fact that he doesn't know much more than the basics anyway.)

"Okay, grand secret of cuisine numero uno: read the box." He produces a box with a flourish, waves it under Karkat's nose and then lobs it at him as he goes hunting for a clean saucepan.

Karkat grumbles something as the box impacts with his forehead. Whoops. Dave fills the pan with water.

He narrates every single action he takes, including "And let us not forget a lid for the pan, makes bubbles come faster, nanana" complete with little hummed tune.

He doesn't even know for sure why he can't manage to turn around and look at Karkat. Probably there are too many possibilities.

John will be dropping by after work. Dave isn't too sure why. Likely it's to discuss today, maybe catch him up, maybe tell Karkat off.

Talking to Karkat about his behavior is Dave's responsibility, though, but Dave isn't sure how to get there without bringing Slick up again and yeah, no, he really doesn't want to.

Water salted, he dumps the pasta in, and wastes half of a minute watching it cook.

"Hey, Karkat?"

"Hm?"

"Why'd you want to try it?" he asks, studiously watching the pasta. "Was it just because of what the anons said about the desk thing?"

"You'll need to define 'it'," Karkat says, sounding like he can guess but Dave's refusal to say it is too stupid to let it slide. Dave still refuses to turn and look back at him.

He gets a block of cheese and a bowl and grate and starts decimating the cheese.

"Putting my dick in your mouth," he barks, like another minute hasn't gone on between the question and the answer.

Even without looking he can tell Karkat is bristling. Fuck. "If it was a _problem_ \--"

"No, no! I was just -- didn't expect it. Is all." His ears are warm. "It was -- really nice." Awesome. Fantastic. Fantabulous. "Usually you're content with letting me do my thing, so I was just wondering if -- I -- aw, shit. I'm not saying I _minded_. Fuck, I did the opposite of mind, I--"

Something room temperature and smooth presses against the side of his neck.

 _Bzzt_.

Half the cheese takes off flying; the cheese grater clatters to the very edge of the counter. Dave has whirled around and is backed up against the same counter, a hand on his neck. He stares in horror at his demon, who sits patiently on his haunches with the crime weapon still raised.

"You--"

Karkat stares back, lips pursed, unimpressed. "Me?"

" _No dildo in the kitchen!_ " Dave tries not to hyperventilate. Spoiler, he fails. "Holy shit, you don't bring that thing to -- no, okay, no, it stays on the mezzanine or maybe in the bathroom if you, I mean okay I'm not thinking about that."

Karkat has stepped back to the door, so the dildo is technically outside the kitchen, but apart from that he is still staring. "This is the most ridiculous display of irrational what-the-fuckery I have seen you perform so far, and I've seen quite a bit. I should probably be taking notes. What do you have against my dildo anyway?"

Dave produces a very manly whimper.

"That thing is a _sex aid_ ," he bites out, face gone red. Only Karkat can make him flush like that, he swears. Not even _Bro_ has managed since Dave stopped being a teenager. Maybe Rose once or twice but that's it. Karkat is breaking him. "You're not using it for sex, I get that, okay, whatever, I see it and I still think about you using it like in the manual. I mean why the fuck couldn't she have gotten you a _real_ massager?!"

"They short out if they get wet," Karkat replies, 'duh' infused in every syllable.

It is not duh, Dave feels. It is not a duh thing _at all_. " _How do you know that_ \--"

"Internet."

" _\--why would it get wet--_ "

"Put it on my tongue."

"--aaaahhh. Haa. Haha. Aaaaaahh. _Someone kill_ _me_." He rakes both hands through his hair, whimpering and laughing both.

"Don't be stupid, I wouldn't let anyone kill you," Karkat says with zero sympathy. "You'll have to live through it."

Dave massages his forehead. A lot.

"Why did you even touch me with it. This is a Karkat-only toy. I don't care where it goes on you, it does not go on me." Or in -- _aaaaahhh_.

"Why? It's not like it's dirty."

"You're just fucking with my head now, aren't you."

Karkat's brow furrows. Dave sighs.

"If you use it on me," he says, trying to keep it the simplest it can, "then it stops being a Karkat toy and becomes a Karkat-and-Dave toy. And I, personally, can only see it as the kind of sensation play that is _not_ platonic and innocent and yippee yay _discovery_."

Fuck yes he can. He wants to discover how deep that soft, tiny gap between his thighs goes. Considering it looked tight enough he might have had trouble working a single finger in, imagining that silvery rocket slowly spreading -- argh. Argh, argh, argh. No, bad, stop.

"It's yours, Rose gave it to you, it's for you to do whatever you want to yourself with zero input on my part, so I absolutely refuse to engage with it. Okay?"

"I don't get why you're making such a federal case out of it, but okay, I suppose I get the reasoning." Karkat shrugs, rakes him with a last searching look, and trots off to the mezzanine. Dave goes to save the cheese grater from its cliffhanger state and breathes. Woohoo, productive dialogue achieved. He feels like he should award himself a truckload of points.

The counter is clean enough; he gathers the spilled cheese and puts it back in the bowl, and starts grating anew. This meal is going to be Cholesterol Central. He's fine with it.

"There, I put it away." Karkat pads inside the kitchen, pulls a chair to the counter, and perches on it, casual in his curiosity.

He watches Dave's hands. Dave bows his head over the bowl and talks himself out of kissing him. "Wanna try?"

"Mnh. Why the fuck not."

"Good, thanks. Wash your hands first."

Takes half a minute and some stretching. Once that's done, Dave hands over the culinary instruments of doom, and goes looking through the cupboards for one of those big dishes that can go in the oven and not explode.

"You know what, we should totally add bacon."

Karkat blinks at him, briefly distracted from his slightly too tight hold on the cheese. "Are you telling me that it's possible to add bacon, and yet sometimes you _don't_?"

"I know, right, my laziness will lead me to a tragic end some day."

Dave gets the bacon. Karkat grates half the block with dogged determination; Dave hands him another bowl to fill, since he seems to be having fun.

It's... really nice. Cooking with Karkat like this, just -- no hostility or anything, just working quietly together. He likes it.

"I like it better," Karkat says, still scowling in challenge at the cheese.

"Hm?" For a second he wonders if his demon has gone telepathic somehow.

"Feeding on you like that. It wasn't as good as when you rub between my thighs, but way better than when you just touch yourself on your own. And I liked doing it myself." He's mumbling now, like he's embarrassed. (Dave's own embarrassment is a tidal wave that he can feel coming, but for the moment it's still looming threateningly over the landscape and not coming down to crush him, so he can observe.) "It was -- more fun. Doing it myself."

Dave is torn between hngh and aw, straight down the middle.

"I -- kinda liked it too. Really liked it actually. So I --"

If he tells Karkat he should do it again if he wants to, it kind of becomes selfish again, like he's angling for another blowjob. He's not... quite angling for that. If tomorrow Karkat decides he wants to give Dave a footjob with his terrifying mantis-velociraptor toes and all the sausage-shredding, eviscerating power he can pack in a single kick, Dave will still say yes.

Not even because it's dangerous and he's fucked up like that. But because...

Roxy was right, enthusiastic consent is the _sexiest_ fucking thing. (Even if Karkat doesn't do it because he desires Dave in a filthy carnal way, only in a hungry one. It still... it's probably as good as it'll ever get. He can be content with that.)

He shakes himself out of it, gives Karkat a tiny flick of a smile. "No complaints."

Karkat grates, head bowed studiously over the bowl. His little tail flicks from side to side happily.

Dave gets cream from the fridge, and does not, not, _not_ kiss him.

He drains the pasta while Karkat butters the inside of the plate and then they layer pasta and cheese and cream and bacon and some more pasta. Karkat insists to spread the cheese properly on top; leaving holes in the coverage would apparently be a crime and Dave would get stuck with disposing of the cheeseless evidence. And then in the oven it goes.

"How long?"

Dave doesn't bother to put on a timer; it's one of the perks of being a Time summoner, he's gotten pretty good at tracking that shit. "Half hour."

Karkat deflates, glowers at the oven.

"Staring won't make it cook faster. Probably the other way around actually. I've heard a number of grandmas say it, and they know their shit. You stare at a pot of water on the fire, poof! It'll never boil, _ever_."

"Quantum mechanics don't work like that," Karkat retorts with a roll of all his eyes.

Dave snorts. "Pff, a demon talking about quantum mechanics."

"Just because your understanding of science is flawed doesn't mean there's any contradiction, dickweed."

Dave drags a chair from the table so he can sit at the counter with Karkat, elbows propped up on the ceramic, cheek resting on his hand. "Ooh. School me, then, science teacher Vantas. Explain how the wisdom of my forefathers is wrong."

Karkat rolls his eyes at him again, but almost fondly. (Well, not too disdainfully, at least.) "Can you school me on gravity? Laws and constants, ballistic equations?"

"Uh, no."

"But you can still tell when you're about to tip over and that you should rectify that, or how to throw a rock so it'll land roughly where you want it to land. Because you've lived in that shit ever since you've been conceived."

"Okay, point. So demons live immersed in quantum physics. Sounds fun."

"So do you, meatsack. It's so far down you don't notice it, is all."

Dave might be smiling a little. Just a little.

Dickweed, meatsack. It's got to be love. Heh.

"Hungry," Karkat grumbles, and glares through Dave at the oven. That or he's glaring at Dave's lower left ribs, but Dave doubts it somehow.

"Let's hope we'll be done eating before John drops by, or he'll want a bite."

"What?" Karkat straightens up, offended. "Fuck him, no! He didn't cook it, he doesn't get to eat it. What the fuck is he coming over for anyway? Why is he always at your place, it's annoying!"

John's been at Dave's exactly three times since Karkat came home. He _might_ be overreacting a little. Dave secretly thinks it's cute as fuck when Karkat gets territorial, so he lets it go.

"Work stuff," he answers vaguely, and looks away. "Keeping me up to date, maybe."

"Maybe?" Karkat stares at him, puzzled for a second, and then -- "Oh."

Subdued, deflating. Dave doesn't like that.

There's that conversation they've got to have, though. The one he's not going to let John handle, because John might be the detective in charge on the Slick dossier but Dave is the detective in charge of Karkat and everyone else can fuck off.

"About Jack?" Karkat asks, all quiet.

Dave sighs. "Maybe about you." He looks at his demon, sober. It aches, breaking the comfortable closeness, going back to being a cop here, in the kitchen where it smells good and it's warm and they get along so nicely. "I won't order you to stop caring about him. That'd be so unethical I have no words for it. But can you tell that the way you acted during the interview was not okay?"

Karkat looks down, shoulders drooping, drawing in defensively.

"You took his side," Dave points out, not entirely necessarily. "You took his side against John and me. We were before a criminal and we weren't presenting a united front. It's okay to make them see that, might get them to think they can get better deals if they play on that -- but not if it's actually true."

Karkat opens his mouth, hesitates, closes it without saying a thing.

"So I need to know your priorities here."

Heh. Like he doesn't already know. He doesn't want to hear it confirmed.

Needs to have it out in the open, though. Where everyone can see it.

"I know you can't really decide to act against my orders and it sucks. But if you feel -- it might be better for everyone if I didn't place you in a position where you're stuck between my orders and your wishes."

It's silly how much it aches, on the side of his heart that is a cop before all else, all the way through. Karkat's been exceeding orders and getting interested in their investigations, and contrary and hostile as he can get on a bad day he couldn't even bring himself to say he didn't want that badge, back in the hospital with Heuang. But he can't be even a honorary cop if he's going to try to save the criminals from the police.

Karkat's mouth is all small and pinched down at the corners and his eyes are sad, it aches.

He's unexpectedly solemn when he meets Dave's eyes, though. Determined.

"I don't know what broke him," he starts quietly. "I wish I could fix him, but I can't, and even if I could he wouldn't let me. He's been living that way so long he'd feel like I'm breaking him -- breaking who he is now, not helping shit. And he certainly knows he's going against the rules, so."

Oh. Huh.

But logic versus emotions, yeah, logic actually rarely wins. It's crazy how often it doesn't. "So?" Dave prompts.

Karkat breathes in, squares his shoulders, nods to himself and looks up again. "He made his choice -- and the civilians whose lives he's fucking up haven't. I agree he should be punished. It's fair. It's right. I just -- I can't help but also want to fix him. Punishment without healing at the end is kind of -- what _for_? Might as well just kill him, he won't change his course for so little, not now."

Oh. "Legal system says he hasn't done anything quite that bad yet."

"Mnh." Karkat sighs. "He needs to be kept away from civilians, at any rate. I guess prison works well enough for that goal, even if death would work better."

He's trying so hard to sound dispassionate. Dave reaches out slowly, rests his hand on Karkat's wrist, squeezes. (The chitin doesn't give.)

"Is that what you think?"

"It's what I just _said_." Karkat growls a little, annoyed, but relents. He can't lie to Dave but creative evasion is still possible and they both know it. "Yeah. It is."

"And is it what you feel?"

A beat of silence, of hesitation. "...It hurts."

Dave runs his thumb against Karkat's thumb and waits.

"But if -- the bank. There could have been someone in it -- hiding from him -- they could have died. The bank could have fallen on a house next door. Erisol could have -- I don't think they had any _clue_ what Erisol could do, with the right orders, or the wrong fucking ones. It's fair if he kills to eat or to defend himself, but not by _carelessness_. Or just because it's _easier_ , what kind of waste is that?"

Dave finds he's smiling. He doesn't try to stop. "So you feel...?"

"Actually I think I'm a bit angry at him. Huh." Karkat blinks -- deflates. "But I still... I mean. I don't think I can stop wanting to -- I -- he's _Blood_."

Dave pulls his chair closer, slips his hand around the back of Karkat's neck, tugs him in gently. "It's okay if you wish you could help him. You just can't save everyone, and he doesn't want to be saved. I need to know if you'll prioritize a grown-ass man who made his own choices, or civilians."

Karkat gives a tiny nod, teeth worrying at his lip, one that says 'I heard,' not necessarily 'I agree.'

"And if you're gonna prioritize the civilians then you've got to work with us."

Karkat snorts quietly, gives him a sharp look. "What if I don't agree with how you handle it?"

"Then we talk about it, in private. If we spend our time trying to put spokes in each other's wheels we'll just crash everyone and none of us will get anywhere."

He lets Karkat think. His thumb runs back and forth over interlocked shell segments; he looks down at it, the intricate precision of it. Smoke gray and blood red.

"You have my Name," Karkat says, slow and measured. "I will follow your orders."

It aches like a surprise kick to the heart.

"In the places where you leave me my free will, I will side with the victim and the good of the community."

Dave's hand closes on the back of Karkat's neck and he squeezes. His fingers rub against the leather string holding up his own badge.

He wants to hug him, like, a _lot_. An awfully unprofessional lot. Maybe with tongue. Karkat isn't much into kisses, though, so Dave just bumps their foreheads together gently and smiles at him, nose to nose, eyes meeting over his shades.

And then he pulls out his phone.

**To: John**   
**Subject: (none)**   
**Message: hey you remember that thing you know *the* thing**   
**i need you to bring it with you after all**   
**i hope youre not already enroute**

The answer is near instantaneous.

**From: John**   
**Subject: re: (none)**   
**Message: uh, yes, i kind of am :(**

Crap. It would have been such nice timing.

And then some asshole knocks hard on the door, making both Dave and Karkat startle.

"Just so happens I had it on me anyway!" John yells right through the wood.

"You asshole," Dave grumps back, and trudges to the door to let him in. Karkat follows, puzzled and wary.

"What are you guys talking about?"

John grins down at him as he steps in, like the thing with Slick didn't happen at all. "Top secret! For the next, uh, I dunno how long. Dave?" He grimaces in a way that is supposed to convey things, probably. Dave gives him a bland look.

"Had a talk."

He expects to be asked what about, but John just nods.

"You're satisfied?"

"I'm satisfied. Hand it over."

John pulls out a Kraft envelope from inside his jacket; Dave takes it, crouches before Karkat.

"So," John asks, looking interested, amused, teasing, and not serious one bit. "Decided to protect and serve this fine city of ours?"

... Of course John would deduce that. Bluh.

Karkat still looks baffled. Even more so when Dave tugs the leather string around so he can see the knot, and starts to pick at it with his nails.

"Shut up," he growls, briefly distracted from Dave. "I already protected it, so now it's mine. I'd be everyone's laughingstock if I let just anyone waltz in and fuck it up again. Uh, what the fuck?"

Dave doesn't answer, too busy with the knot. Karkat's been showering with it, it's been tugged at, it refuses to loosen at all.

Oh, whatever.

"You bring the other thing, too?"

"Yeah, it's in the envelope as well."

Dave gets his Swiss knife from his back pocket and slices through the string. His badge falls in his hand. Karkat looks down at it, stunned silent.

Dave pockets the knife and the badge (still warm from having been nestled against Karkat's collarbone so long, and his neck looks weirdly bare now, weirdly naked.)

He opens the envelope and fishes out a length of wide, dark blue leather, with an impressive silvery buckle. No spikes, at least. (It'd suit Karkat better if it were red, but blue, even in this too-dark shade, is more of a police color, and besides John didn't have anything in red anyway.) Karkat looks at it with distaste and a strange look of disappointment.

Dave fishes out the other thing.

"Here. This is yours."

Karkat turns the badge over in his hand. The metal is still bright, brand new. Dave watches him discover the ID number and the pin on the back of it.

"It's... mine," he repeats, like the words don't quite make sense.

"If you want it," Dave says. John stands beside them in silence.

Karkat stares at it for another long moment before his fingers close on it and he looks up.

"Yes."

He gives a look of distaste at the leather in Dave's hand, and then he breathes out and lifts his chin anyway.

"It's not a collar," John says, a smile in his voice -- but thankfully there's no laughter. "You put it on your upper arm. Won't bother you much there."

Karkat blinks, startled. "No collar? What about all those little old people who need to see I'm under control or some shit?"

Dave takes the badge out of his hand -- it's a little difficult, Karkat's fingers are closed on it and he resists some -- and threads it on the leather armlet thing, whatever it's called. Cuff, maybe? Whatever. "Collar says animal. Armband says security." He shrugs. "We're weeding out the unfit and the slow-witted. Bit late in their breeding season but better late than never."

"Dave!" John protests around a laugh. "He's bullshitting. Don't listen to him. Anyway there's been some news coverage and I wouldn't be surprised if you end up on TV again soonish, so hopefully soon enough people will be more used to you."

Dave reaches for Karkat's left arm; Karkat holds it up for him, still a little baffled, a beat too slow.

"We'll have to take off that stupid dangling ring, you might get caught on something," Dave muses as he belts it on. The shield is on the outer side of his arm, under his shoulder, far away enough from his shoulder and elbow plates that it won't rub against anything. "You mind, Egbert?"

"Nah, I'm not using it anymore, you can do anything you want with it."

Karkat blinks up at him. "What the hell were you using it for?" He peers down at it; the inside is padded, not that Karkat cares with his shell but still.

Dave groans. "No, please, don't ask him--"

"It's Equius' price!" John says with a bright, bright grin, right over Dave's protests. "He's got a bondage thing."

Dave wishes Karkat would react normally, but the second he hears 'price' he just goes "Oh. Huh." And then he squints at the buckle and the ring on his armband. "They're used to restrain humans, aren't they. I think I know that."

"Yup! I used to wear wrist cuffs under my shirts but a judge saw one at court once and le gasp shocking so I had to move them elsewhere. I don't mind, makes me feel badass."

Dave groans, again, massages the bridge of his nose. "John, they are not _badass biker spiked cuffs_ , they are _bottom boy please tie me down and molest me cuffs_."

"They're whatever I want them to be in my heart! But anyway, upper arm kind of wears on my shirt sleeves, so I moved 'em somewhere else _again_ , and now I've got like a dozen wrist cuffs and armbands that I have no clue what to do with. Equius is all prissy about them all being for a _specific_ place each, and it's not like I can just hand them away! Well, I guess I could give them to Roxy--"

"Auuuuuugh."

"--but none of them would fit."

"John _I hate you_. We do not mention sisters in bondage gear, even the tamer things I don't care no shut up. That is taboo and does not exist. Equius has another, entirely wholesome price for her. He does. I know it in my heart."

Karkat is sitting on his haunches and his right hand is covering his badge, like he wants to make sure it's real or maybe that it's not going to fall off. It makes Dave's chest do funny and possibly illegal tricks.

Still, he looks at Dave's attempt to smother an anguished expression, and then he _smirks_ , long and slow.

"So..." he drawls, looking up at John. "Where are you wearing it now?"

"Oh my god, I hate you. I hate you so much."

"Well, it depends on if I'm paying off anything big--" oh lord please make it so John says nothing about any kind of harness, please, please "--but today it's just a retainer, so it's a single strap."

He smiles and dips his head, bashful, and shuffles his feet a little. His hand curves toward his hip.

Dave is still crouching on the floor with Karkat. He is at exactly the wrongest possible height.

"No. No John. No."

"Huh," Karkat says, and ogles John's fly.

" _No_. Oh god."

"Aw, come on, Dave, it's really not that uncomfortable once you get used to it to wear a cockr--"

"No! Holy Jesus and baby Satan and their lovebaby I swear to fuck Egbert--"

John starts laughing, and so does Karkat.

Dave pauses in the middle of straightening up, giving the both of them wary, betrayed looks. "You fucking bunch of assholes--"

"Just kidding." John pulls up his pants leg. It's on his ankle; a dark, almost black blue. "By the way it smells like something is burning."

Dave and Karkat knock into each other rushing to the kitchen.

They manage to save the mac 'n cheese -- though it's a good thing Dave likes it really well browned. When John predictably invites himself over for dinner Karkat makes Dave feed him on his half of the plate.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jul. 21: edited some dialogue for ICness.

Seven AM. Dave is in the shower. At eight he's got to be at the station.

Today's going to be exciting, but he spent the last fifteen minutes meditating on Aradia and it almost put him back to sleep. Eyes closed, he stands under the hot spray.

God, does he like having his very own hot water tank. He should probably leave some for Karkat, though. Reluctantly, he straightens up, reaches for the soap.

"Hey," Karkat calls from outside the bathroom. Dave arches an eyebrow.

"Yeah?"

"That demon's pretty dangerous, right."

Dave snorts. They've managed to bring back one single victim to sanity so far, and he's fragile and cries at the drop of a hat. Another two have managed to commit suicide, despite the number of people who were around nonstop to care for them. Implies some fucking horrifying things. "Noooo kidding, dude."

Karkat says something, which Dave doesn't hear; he grunts a question. Karkat cracks the door open. "I said, _are you prepared_ , fuckface."

It's cute that Karkat is getting involved. Uh, not cute, it's... heartwarming? Encouraging? He's taking their duty seriously and being proactive about it, it's pretty cool. "Yeah, yeah. Gun's ready, Damara's loaded." (She snorts in his head.) "Just gotta take a baseball bat to that nice mantel clock I've got for her, but that won't take long."

"Okay, I should probably get ready too," Karkat says casually, and walks in.

Dave fumbles the soap, which squirts from his hands and flies gracefully over the cabin's glass wall. Karkat blinks dubiously down at where it glided to a stop between his hands.

And then he closes the bathroom door behind him.

"Uh. Karkat."

Karkat picks up the soap with one hand, sits up on his haunches, pulls the shower door open with his free hand. "Hm?"

He hands Dave the soap; Dave takes it without thought. Then he puts a hand on Dave's belly and pins him to the _really fucking cold_ tiles.

"Holy _shit_ , what the hell!" Dave glares down at his demon, spine arched off the wall as much as he can. His bangs slop in his face; he has to close an eye.

Pretty hard to stay angry when he has Karkat at crotch height and they're both naked. Not that Karkat is ever anything but, but... well. There's something about being in the shower that makes him nakeder somehow.

He can almost hear his sister arching her eyebrow at him about his language butchering. Shut up, Mind Rose, nakeder is so a word.

_Pffahaha._

_Also shut up, Mind Latula, plz._

"Not that I want you to leave or anything but you probably shouldn't wear your badge under the shower, bud. The leather will--"

" _Not_ taking it off," Karkat growls back, baring his teeth at him. "Anyway, if it's ruined then good, you can get me a red one instead. One that Equius hasn't slobbered over, preferably. Now get down here, I'm not doing this standing up."

Karkat is the _romantiquest_.

Also Dave really, really likes that he doesn't want to take it off. Like... _can I kiss you on the face everywhere_ levels of like. He gives in; lets himself slide down the cold as hell tiles so he's sitting on his haunches, lower back pressed to the wall, and cups Karkat's face with both hands. Derailed, his demon frowns, makes a puzzled little pouty moue.

Okay so Dave is totally kissing him. He leans in and presses their mouths together, a bit insistent, holds it a second and then two. No tongue, though. He -- he really wishes Karkat got what's good about French kissing.

(He wishes Karkat got what it tends to imply.) He breaks away from his mouth to kiss the tip of his nose.

"I thought you thought bathroom sex was too stupid to contemplate."

Karkat growls lightly and places his hands on Dave's thighs to balance himself, leans in until Dave is sitting straight with his head pressed to the tiles and Karkat is still right in his face, seesaw teeth bared at the tips. "That's why I want you sitting, douchenozzle, because your brain is somehow just smart enough to know it's stupid and yet stupid enough to want it anyway." A soft, soft snarl. "Tell me I'm wrong."

Karkat is really not wrong. Water is spattering his shell heartily, making it all sleek and bright, darkening the velvet of his face in long, slowly diffusing trails, droplets are caught in his hair -- he's getting all wet and Dave wants to explore how that feels all over.

He smoothes his hands up Karkat's arms; skin glides and catches in turn on their sculpted, hard planes. Karkat nuzzles his way down Dave's jaw, nips here and there, buries his face in Dave's neck and he can still feel the points of his teeth. It feels so nice.

Dave makes a note to apologize to Rose for all the times he mocked her vampire phase mercilessly, because wow would it be sexy to have Karkat's teeth in him right now... Only if they left tiny anchoring puncture wounds behind, mind; he's really not in the right frame of mind to enjoy having a mouthful of flesh chewed right through his jugular.

Karkat pushes his way between Dave's knees, flanks rubbing against the inside of Dave's thighs, and _ngh_. It's a hideous travesty that Karkat has nothing to fuck him with, because he would be riding that like a leather-faced cowboy at his fiftieth rodeo, there would be no getting him off _that_ bucking bronco.

Hot as it is, his thighs are starting to shake, strained, his ankle hurts; he shuffles his weight awkwardly on one foot, so he can unfold a leg, and then he drops the rest of the way to the shower floor. He stretches his legs as much as he can in the stall -- crap, kicked the door open, water will be getting out on the mat. Oh, what the hell, who cares, it'll dry.

"Nice view," he manages, as Karkat frowns at him like a wedding caterer who just had bridezilla decide to change the dinner menu on her again.

... uh. Okay, that is sure a thing he just thought. Funny how Dave's comparisons get sillier and more random the more blood travels to his downstairs head. Does his dick have matrimony on the brain now? What the heck, lil' dude.

And now he has a demon shoving his knees together and straddling his lap. The head of his dick bumps against Karkat's water-streaked belly. Mmh. "Even nicer view. I approve. Like. A lot."

"One day I'll find a way to shut you up during this," Karkat grouses as he leans in to nip his earlobe. Fff yes.

"Dude, gags are a bit kinkier than I expected you to sugge _ssssh okay that was nice._ "

Karkat just went and ground his -- can a probably male demon have a mound of Venus? -- his fuzz-covered pelvic plate riiight up his cock and it was _almost_ too hard, but also a pretty awesome way to get Dave's entire attention. He grips Karkat's hips, guides him for a second pass; they've done this often enough that Karkat has learned to roll his hips into it and fuck if it isn't sexy as hell.

Karkat shuffles up on his knees a bit, so that the head of Dave's dick is trapped between the slight jut of his pelvis and Dave's belly. "Move down -- need more space for my knees--"

Dave does, groaning a bit as he oozes down the wall and shuffles his butt farther along. His neck will ache some, being forced to bow, but he can deal with it if it means Karkat can ride properly. His dick pops free and swings between Karkat's thighs, glances off a soft inner thigh, _almost_ brushes against that place in the middle.

Dave stares, transfixed.

_Good. Now grab his hips like a rodeo calf. Spit him on your pole of meat. Mighty fucker._

"Oh my fucking _god_ Damara what the fuck!"

He lets go of Karkat in a great disgusted hurry, presses both hands on his eyes like that will help at all with the images she's putting in his head.

_Put your pole of lust in his moist crevice. And shake your hips hard. He will moan. Raging tornado fuck._

Dave oozes farther down the wall, groaning. "No, shut up, you're killing it--"

Right on top of him, Karkat starts growling. Dave peeks between his fingers, startled.

"Why is she disturbing you _now_."

_You bore me. Go on to fuck him. Quickly._

"Offering advice," Dave answers with a groan.

Karkat's wings are spreading slowly, not that they're large enough to make him look much bigger but when he angles them like that, leading edges down, fingertips spread up and around his shoulders, it gets very noticeable that he's basically walking around with a double handful of hook-tipped knives strapped to his back. It can't be read any other way than as a threat.

Inside his mind it's like Damara is sneering, almost elegant and entirely disdainful. _You cannot threaten me. Caged in flesh. Useless slave._

_Shit, Damara, I am not repeating that to him! Why the fuck are you trying to provoke him?!_

_I am not. Truth is truth._ Dave growls; she keeps going. _You call with thoughts of my price. You call then do not offer. Then I want to leave. Show me fucking. Give me reason to stay._

Dave swears under his breath. _And if I don't, then you won't answer in a half-hour when I actually need you, is that it?_

She scoffs, or smirks maybe, it's the feeling it gives anyway. _Your sex will be over faster than that. Five minute man._

 _Wow, fuck you._ Damara doesn't see the future; it was an insult, not a prediction. Fuck her, seriously. He can last longer than five fucking minutes!

Yeah, but he really, really has to be at work at eight on the dot. If they keep wasting time, five minutes is all they'll have time for -- and Karkat is right, if there might be a fight then he _needs_ to feed today. Groaning, he bumps his head against the wall. "No, seriously, I can _not_ concentrate on actually _having_ sex if you're offering horrible tips in the background--"

Huh, Karkat in his face. All his eyes have gone narrow, faintly glowing red.

"Damara," he says, and it sounds like ancient clocks dragging through their last tic tocs, ruins slowly falling to dust as a blizzard hisses and shrieks all around them. "You're between _me and my food_. Are you fucking sure you want to be _doing that_."

Damara scoffs. _Little scared boy, not a tenth of what he was. What can you do? Locked in that meat._

Dave has the sudden feeling that he had better damn well not repeat that. That first half, at least. What the hell is she talking about?

"So, uh," he starts cautiously, "you knew each other in demonspace, then?"

"No," Karkat snaps, lip curling. "What is she saying? She has to be talking."

Dave sighs. Wow, his boner is deflating, despite how close it is to Karkat's no-no place. This is a sad, sad day. He paraphrases: "You can't make her. Nyah nyah nyah."

A faint red tendril flickers and curls over Karkat's shoulders like lightning in slow motion, and his claws grate against the tiles, but he breathes out. "Right."

Uh oh, thinks Dave for some reason.

"Latula." Dragon scales, wind singing. Something tugs inside Dave, like his guts are the middle knot and his demons are each at one end of the rope. "Knight to knight. Get her to _back the fuck off_. You owe me."

Oh yeah, that was the reason. "Wait, Damara has to be around later when we--"

 _Welp._ Latula pops in his head in all her scaly glory like... well, like she was here all along and didn't want to disturb, but then again she's here so often it feels that way even when she's actually gone, so it's hard to tell. Dave isn't sure what to feel about the fact that she didn't add her own commentary to the proceedings sooner. _'kay, I'll do that. No worries, firetruck, she wants to be entertained, I can be hella entertaining. Go get laid to the max!_

Damara is laughing; if she had a throat it would come out from the deepest part of it, shake her whole frame. _Yes! Dragon bitch, fight me. Coil with me. I will bite you apart._

Shit. "No killing each other!" Dave yelps, but too late, they're both gone.

Fuck. Wow. It's crazy how well his demons listen to him and his orders today. Granted, Damara and Latula aren't under orders at the moment, and Karkat -- he's too used to talking to him like an equal, it doesn't come naturally to order him around when they're in rather intimate situations instead of in the field and the little bastard _uses_ that. Dave scowls at him.

Karkat's unfocused eyes sharpen, meet his.

He smirks, toothy and satisfied. He leans in, elbows planted on the wall on both sides of Dave's head, caging him. Dave can see nothing but his face, so close, his collarbone and throat. His eyes still shine, throwing a reddish glow on the curls of armor on his cheekbones, the tip of Dave's nose.

His eyelashes are so thick.

He leans in -- Dave doesn't think, just lifts his chin to meet his kiss, gets his lower lip caught and bitten, it feels good until it stings, and then it feels better. Karkat licks at his sore lip as he settles in his lap again, making quiet little cricket chirps that vibrate into Dave's mouth.

"Mine," he purrs smugly, and grinds his belly against Dave's dick.

Oh.

Yes.

He rolls his hips -- he can't thrust, not reclining against the wall like that, but he can move some. He finds someplace to plant his feet, to brace; Karkat leans on his chest and keeps rocking, grinding. He's still nipping along his jaw, down the side of his neck. Dave will be marked up, and he doesn't even care.

When Karkat's face is pressed to his neck Dave still can see nothing but his spread wings, blocking his vision.

" _Yes_ ," Karkat hisses, and Dave hisses a yes of his own -- "good, good--" feels good, " _feed me..._ "

Dave closes his eyes, presses his face against Karkat's hard shoulder. Slides his hands from his hips to his shoulder blades, under the wings, pulls him chest to chest.

(Karkat likes feeding, exchanging energy. It's good for him too. It's cool.)

The demon can't move around as much, held so tight, and he squirms a little, but Dave is close enough and it only takes him a short time to grind and rock himself to his orgasm.

He shakes, afterwards, from the strain of holding his body so tense, shoulders propped at an angle against the wall and his demon's weight on him trying to fold him down into the corner and never mind his spine. He bats weakly at Karkat's shoulder, and Karkat moves off him and pushes himself up high on his hind legs, one hand on the wall -- oh, he's unhooking the showerhead.

Dave manages to push himself along the slippery floor to sit straighter. Huh, his thighs are shaking too. He blinks up at Karkat as the demon hoses himself down quickly, spraying Dave's face -- and then turns the jet on Dave's stomach, washing off his come.

"Heh, thanks."

"Mnh." Karkat stretches, fairly self-satisfied. It's so strange to be the one at thigh level and Karkat the one looming over him. "Pretty nice today. You'll have to tell me what pinged you there."

He hooks the jet back up, looks down at Dave. Dave looks up, wet hair hanging in his face, droplets sprinkling his forehead and cheeks.

 _I appear to really fucking enjoy your displays of territorial bastardliness,_ he carefully doesn't say. Karkat gets territorial over just about everything else already -- Dave's cubicle, his nest in the corner on the mezzanine, that goddamn vibrator, the _town_. He doesn't need the encouragement.

"Eh, I dunno." Dave climbs to his feet in the narrow space left, careful not to slip; his legs are still unsteady. "If you're done playing the starving waif, go get dry, will you?"

"Yeah, yeah." Karkat goes, exiting the cabin and letting himself flop back down on all fours on the soggy mat.

Dave washes the soap off him and shampoos his hair quickly. Still another twelve minutes before they have to go. He can do this. He rinses and dries haphazardly, gets dressed, walks out to get his shoes.

He finds Karkat lovingly rubbing his hands _all over_ the mantel clock he pulled out of storage for Damara.

"... Dude, what are you even doing."

"She put her horrid aftertaste on my meal, she can deal with my aftertaste on hers," Karkat replies, satisfied, and bounces off to the kitchen, presumably for a second breakfast. Dave sighs, gets the baseball bat from its corner, and prays that his Knight of Mind and Witch of Time haven't killed each other while he was busy getting seductively humped until he got back cramps.

\--

The borderlands are really quiet today.

It's not the lack of cars and people and friggin' _pigeons_ \-- that _,_ Dave got used to pretty early in his career. It's not even how the footsteps around him -- Karkat, Burnett, her partner Grier, four uniformed officers -- only make things feel quieter in comparison.

It's just...

"Control, this is Team B. How long has it been since one of the teams saw a Class One?" he asks Jade via his earpiece.

The line crackles from ambient magic, but Jade's voice comes through clearly enough. " _Huh_ ," she goes. " _Let me map that._ "

(Makes him miss her a little, her voice in his ear, tinny and far away, because she's his partner and they're used to each other. But she's too drained to be in the field, orders from above. Bluh.)

They've been checking abandoned houses, a gas station; Detective-Summoner Grier has a perfect Sylph of Breath match, for all that they're Class Three, and they can pinpoint living things -- provided they exchange oxygen and the like, but demons who don't breathe are usually solar-powered and wouldn't be able to afford wasting daylight hours away hidden in a dark basement. Those are hella rare anyway.

Doesn't mean they're not all on their guard.

He knows Jade is addressing the whole of Team B when she answers, from the way Burnett's eyes narrow grimly, the way Grier straightens and pulls his shoulders back. " _The decrease of wild demon spotting makes a rough circle; Team B, you're the closest. The center is straight ahead from your position, about half a block. This could mean nothing,_ " she cautions them.

Karkat doesn't have an earpiece -- Dave wasn't opposed to letting him use one, since the static was, while stronger this close to him, not too bad for clear communication, but the second he uses his powers he'll blow it up right in his own ear. Karkat frowns up at the detectives in turn, then looks back at Officer Maguire, who he was pacing. (For some reason he's taken a vague liking to the guy -- no, Dave suspects why, Maguire is Officer Heuang's usual partner and he opened a vein for Karkat to snack on as a thanks for the rescue, no doubt he tasted yummy.)

"What's going on?"

"We're aiming straight for the middle of a big no Class Ones-land," Officer Maguire whispers down to him. "Hell, I ain't seen trace of a Class Two in a while either."

Karkat frowns. "And they can't all be running from me, the Class Ones at least would be too stupid to notice the power divide in time. Hrrm."

Scanning the area, he shakes out his wings, resettles them fussily. Dave isn't sure what for; if he can't fly it won't matter much if they're not folded just right, will it?

He looks up at the sky and the buildings, just in case. He can see a police chopper a few blocks away, but it's pretty high up, won't intervene; it's an older model, so that fiddly, sensitive electronics won't be too likely to go on strike at a bad time, but if it gets too close to the hell gate the blades might well decide to become a giant sunflower or maybe an eggbeater for real. It's there purely to make sure the demon won't give them the slip.

They clear another small house, room by methodical room. Karkat turns out to be pretty alright at working in a team, once he knows exactly what is expected of him -- and Dave doesn't even have to make anything an order; he just listens to Burnett's instructions on his own.

The first inkling Dave has that this house might be different is when his ear piece crackles, once, for no reason at all.

The second is when Officer O'Dell starts screaming.

"Karkat!" Dave snaps, and races up the stairs. O'Dell's partner is dragging him away from an open -- is that a broom closet? O'Dell is pointing his gun at the ceiling even as she pulls him off, still not far gone enough to start shooting at nothing, but his legs kick and push on the floor like he's trying to hurry her up. At the other end of the corridor Burnett and Grier are retreating from the bedroom doors, still closed, to provide cover.

Dave passes O'Dell and Aguilar, Latula's scales shimmering all over his skin, and presses his back to the wall, nods at Karkat -- shelled, safer -- to take a quick glance in there.

Karkat looks and retreats, and then looks again, puzzled.

"There's just a doll in there."

Heart beating strong, Dave checks. The closet isn't even deep enough for Dave's whole arm to disappear in there. There are a couple of abandoned old brooms, a few loose sheets of paper. On the bottom there's -- oh, urgh, it looks like Lil' Cal's cousin or something. Fucking puppets.

Could be something magical anyway, and Latula feels all bristly and watchful in the back of his head. Dave pulls at Damara, reduces it to dust.

_We are done here? Mighty killer of puppets. I can leave now._

_Nice try. No._

In the staircase O'Dell lets out a big shuddery breath. "Shit. That was nasty."

"How are you feeling?" Detective Burnett asks past Dave, her back still to him as she and her partner cover him.

"I-- better now, ma'am. I can go on."

"Alright." The older woman turns to look at Dave, looks him over and for a second he feels like maybe this is how it is to have a mom and to have not cleaned your room. "Strider? Can you try a mind shield now?"

Dave would, only the second he thinks it, Latula shakes his head. "Sorry, Bosslady, he ain't needin' it anymore now."

"Hm. Alright. Keep ready."

They move to check the bedrooms. Both empty.

Grier's Sylph confirms no one breathing but the cops and Karkat; Latula confirms -- after Dave himself has seen it all -- the absence of illusions covering things up. They move on.

\--

After the third house with a motherfucking puppet in it Dave is starting to blame Bro for real. If only for the entirely non-magical shudders of disgust their dead little eyes give him.

"Don't _touch_ it," he snaps at Karkat when his demon brings the latest one back, holding it with his claw-tips. Karkat immediately drops it on the floor, eyebrows arched in unflattering, dubious surprise. Dave reduces it to dust right under him.

"It doesn't _do_ anything to me, dumbass," Karkat says pointedly. Dave tries not to grimace. That last one was reclining casually on a little girl's bed.

"I don't care, they're gross, don't touch them." He turns away to check on the latest shaken cop -- Maguire, gone an unhealthy shade of gray-brown, who's already trying to joke it off.

Another empty house, another puppet, another different cop... magically _nudged_ at. This seems tailor-made to -- at best -- make them all twitchy as hell.

Also he's pretty sure O'Dell looked into that room first, and he said nothing about no fucking puppet then.

_I suggest you rub little wooden man with your swollen lusty parts. Much pleasure will be had._

_By who?_

_Me._

_Yeah, that's about what I thought._

Damara is getting on his nerves too. Usually he lets her attitude slide straight off his back, finds something to laugh at in it, but the shower incident didn't dispose him kindly toward her and she's been getting in snide little digs all morning. He wishes she would go back to faint malevolent amusement and stop trying to chat.

"So how much like a setup does this feel like to you?" he asks Burnett, sotto voce. She snorts, eyes scanning the house relentlessly.

"It's nearby," she says, and then "It's toying with us."

Super reassuring. Dave is super reassured. "Huh. How nearby?"

She shrugs. Turns to the rest of the men, shoulders squared; they turn to look at her and Aguilar and Maguire noticeably relax. "Everyone out. It's trying to slow us down. Let's trust the second perimeter to catch it in case it actually is inside one of those houses and gets around us." She gives a wry little smile, thin wrinkles deepening at the corner of her mouth. "Between you and me, I will pay everyone a round if that happens. Vantas, Strider, on point."

Karkat bounces into place, eyebrows knit Very Seriously and tail quivering in anticipation. Dave follows him to the door. They check the outside with quick glances, and go through in the purest police tradition. The area looks secure; Dave signals the rest to join them.

The next house, they pass by warily, and the one after that, but they look... normal. Abandoned, broken into, but normally so, like whatever happened, happened a while ago. That broken window is ten years old, says Damara, reluctantly, those traces of fire licking at the outside of a door a full twenty-three, as long as this has been an uninhabitable zone.

The third house, there's a puppet watching them go past in the window.

Dave flings his hand up without thought. The glass flows, slushy ice-cream in the sun ( _did you know people believed glass is an extremely slow-moving **liquid**_ , Dirk once told him; this close to the gate, it doesn't matter that it doesn't have a lick of truth in it, Damara makes it move like it's lava,) and then the puppet falls into cotton dust and cracked plastic.

Beside him Aguilar is breathing in short, sharp little puffs of breath. He grabs her upper arm, makes sure she's still wearing her cold iron necklace, not that it's been helping anyone else much. "Breathe," he advises.

Fourth cop to be affected. Last of the officers. Fuck.

 _If he fed on them,_ Dave remembers Karkat saying about the victims, the first time he met Burnett, _then there was a bond made._

The demon might not be feeding yet.

There could still be a bond.

_Latula?_

She's molded to all his brain crevices, feels like, clinging to his mind like a second, see-through skin, one he barely notices in action and cannot forget is there. She doesn't need him to actively talk to her to know exactly what he's thinking about.

_Didn't feel nothing I could get at, bro, nothing obvious like that poor kiddo._

Cool.

The demon must be pretty subtle, then.

He listens with one ear as Detective Grier makes a quiet report for Dispatch; at least they'll be warned about the fucking puppets. The street takes a slight turn left next, they've got to be cautious --

"You have got to be fucking _kidding me_ ," Dave hisses quietly, and Damara laughs and won't stop laughing, not even when Latula bites at her.

"I must be dreaming. Is that a _puppet breeding center_ ," Karkat says, all spines up. "Why do you people have those things. _What is wrong with the physical plane_."

"Nah," Dave replies, "it's just a motherfucking _toy shop_." Sigh. "Think we can get the officers to go past it with their eyes closed? They could hold hands."

 _Yes_ , Damara says, _do that._

"On second thought let's not do that."

_It's good also. Do not do that._

Goddamnit. He is _so close_ to telling her to fuck off. But she's the only real offensive demon he's got -- he can trip people with Aradia, he can freeze them for a second even, but he can't wreck their shit any other way but with a bullet, and bullets are much less versatile.

Also there's how Aradia had a prior engagement today. Yeah. Also that.

Okay, there's Karkat, but that's not the same thing--

"Tell me it's a giant puppet," Grier is muttering, squinting at the toy shop.

"Try not to be any more of a cliché horror movie character, buddy," Burnett says with a faintly amused snort. "Right. Is he breathing?" Shirt moving faintly in a wind Dave doesn't feel, Grier reluctantly nods. "Okay. You should stay out with the officers, find somewhere defensible. Any of them goes crazy, sit on them until Strider can race back out."

"Why doesn't he stay out then?"

She turns to her partner and pats his cheek. She reminds Dave of the doting aunt he never had. (Roxy's mom does it too but it always feels like she's mimicking something she saw once on TV and has no clue how to make work in real life.) "Because I'm not taking anyone who's not immune into a puppet den, and as much as it hurts me, you might not be. Alright, partner?"

Grier sighs, nods. Burnett turns to Dave and Karkat. "Strider, Vantas -- we're going inside and bringing that man out. Strider, you're a strapping lad, you get to carry him. Vantas, you're on defense. Anything moves in there, _obliterate it_."

"Yes, ma'am," Karkat replies, eyes shining in an entirely literal way.

They all start moving into position.

"Can I point out that it's totally a trap," Dave says tiredly, even as he jogs after her, both hands holding onto his gun.

The cuddliest-looking soccer mom Dave has ever worked with chuckles under her breath, eyes positively gleaming with evil mirth. "If you like pointing out the obvious so much, who am I to stop you?"

Karkat snorts, teeth bared in a none-too-friendly smile.

"... Haha. Yeah, okay. Let's spring the hell out of it." Since Jade isn't here, Dave would ask Latula to provide a little perspective, but she's just as much of a Knight as the rest of them, which means she's too busy purring.

Karkat gets inside first. Red flickers crawl over his shoulders, up the edges of his wings -- just like this morning, lightning in slow motion. He scans the empty, darkened aisles as he stalks his way around the counter and to the tall, wide-shouldered man draped over a plush armchair in the window, limbs dangling boneless, a toy teacup balanced delicately on his knee.

If Dave didn't know better he'd think the guy was dead.

Burnett follows Karkat, hurrying across the short bit of wall where she's not visible from the street; Dave stays by the door, making sure nothing cuts them off and he can go racing back should anyone try to mindfuck the officers.

She moves around the dude so Dave has a clear line of sight in case he's only pretend-unconscious and then takes his dangling wrist and shakes it. No reaction, it falls back limp. She cuffs him quickly over his stomach, and then she touches his sallow, sharp-featured face and it clicks.

"Shit, that's Crowbar, isn't it."

Carl Barrow, alias Crowbar. One of the highest-ranked members of the Felt -- either second or third in command, it's never been entirely clear. He's lying out here in the middle of a police operation, unconscious and sickly-looking, the delicately placed cherry on top of the enticing seven-layered cake.

 _Welp_ , Latula -- or was it him? -- goes. _Such a tasty trap though._

They're so close to each other right now, reaction time between one mind's request and the other's actions as far down as they can possibly be, and still allow him to separate just enough to grab onto Damara and use her if need be. So close.

Maybe that's why it feels exactly as if the other demon who suddenly appeared in his headspace was talking to him.

_Hey bitchass skank fucking fucker!_

Dave stiffens. Holy fuck there's a demon in his fucking head. _Latula!_ he calls, not panicked yet but _she's letting it in what the fuck?!_ It feels so _wrong_ against his mind, all shards and despair and funhouse mirrors that shift on him, make him nauseous.

_Shit, sorry firetruck! There, any better?_

A thin layer of Latula spreads between the -- the other demon and his mind, and he breathes out, eyes a little wide as he scans the shop, waiting for an attack to use his distraction.

_What the fuck--_

_'Tuna, don't cuddle up when I'm riding, I'm on the job here!_

The other demon goes all contrite. _Welp. Sorry. I forgate. Forgoted. That motherfuck shit thing fucking shitty motherfuck._

Oh. _Him._

This is about the wrongest time to get distracted, but the Heir of Fucking Doom is really fucking good at being distracting. He doesn't even have to say anything, he just has to be around.

(Last time John let him ride while Latula was riding Dave, Dave ended up almost frenching his best bro; the assholes were using the generously provided opportunity to _snuggle_ , and also get to fleshy second base.)

 _If you tell me the enemy sent you to mess things up I will totally believe it!_ Dave says, and feels weirdly like he's yelling across the back of a huge fucking dragon to something he cannot see. He knows it's still there, though. Doom feels too unnerving to miss it when it's almost inside his head.

The street is still empty, apart from their people. The officers are in nicely defensible positions and Grier is scanning the rooftops. All good.

_It's not the enemy, asslord fucknugget. It's your own momfucked shitsucking... uh what was it again, fuck fuck fuck I lost the word, shit!_

_'Tuna, shhhh. Resettle your pattern, dude, you're going all untangly._

_Sorry._

"Burnett," Dave informs her quietly, "I have Mituna in my head. Someone sent him to Latula."

She looks at him, eyes gone narrow, and Karkat frowns up at him quickly before going back to his pacing vigil. "What's that retard doing in there?"

"No clue, he--"

 _Oh! Oh oh oh yeeeeah babe! Your bro says_ _Cal_ _says if you're hanging in the southern borderlands that you need to get your fat nasty ass out of there, you piece of scumsucking ass-trash. Assbutt lord McAnalturdfucker shitsuck--_

_Mituna, tighten your coils, babe--_

_I'mma tighten_ **_your_ ** _bitch-ass skank coils!_

 _So fucking charming, I totally see what you see in him,_ Dave comments, but his heart's not in it.

Cal said.

Cal _said_.

_Yeah, that's right dudz! I tapped dat ass upside down and sideways, yeeeeeeeeah! Whores dig my mad-ass snugglefuck skillz._

Cal doesn't _talk_. It's a cornerstone of Dave's childhood that Cal. Does. Not. Talk. And if you think he does you're wrong and just dreaming and it'll go away in the morning. No matter what fibs Bro tries to make you swallow. (Dirk said so and Dirk is always right. Especially when you're six years old and it's three in the morning and you're sure Cal wasn't on your bed's headboard when you went to sleep.)

Dave is pretty good at denial. It's a skill he's had a lot of practice at.

(Bro is a Prince of Doom. The Mituna-as-a-messenger part of the story checks out.)

Lil' Cal is totally not demon-possessed, anyway, because Bro hasn't got the permits for that shit and Dirk and Dave would have to arrest their own father-slash-uncle-slash-brother-figure, hence it cannot be possessed hence it's not possessed.

... Okay no Cal is totally demon-possessed.

And it has never bothered to warn him off before, and it's not like Dave hasn't done a shit-ton of hugely dangerous things in his reckless little life.

But they've wasted enough time with his little mind guests. He breathes in and out, and goes to haul Crowbar across his shoulders in a fireman's carry. _So if we start running now..._

Mituna explodes into jarring, jagged-edged laughter. It feels like if it were real it should be nasal and breathless, and loud anyway somehow.

_I remembered a thing!_

Karkat paces between him and the aisles. Burnett stays behind, ready to take Crowbar down if he wakes up and starts fighting. Dave slowly starts back toward the door, trying to both settle the man's weight on his back and to keep having this conversation in parallel. _Yeeeeah?_

_He also told me to tell you..._

_Fucking spit it out already._

_Psyche! It's too late! Hahahahahahahaha._

Everything happens together. Dave's radio crackles, loud and garbled. Aguilar and O'Dell start screaming. A shot cracks in the air.

Dave takes off running along the storefronts, the muscular, wide-shouldered body on his back making him slow, clumsy. A shadow falls on him. He throws himself to the ground; air rushes over his head.

The toy shop window explodes; when he cranes his head he sees Karkat hunkering down flat by the door, bristled all over and eyes wide with shock as broken glass tinkles harmlessly off his shelled back, and a finned motherfucking flying streak of demon whirling away from the shop.

Burnett is nowhere in sight.

She is not standing behind the door. She is not crouched behind the counter. She is not--

There's blood splattered on the doorstep and he doesn't know whose it is.

Maguire starts screaming too. Dave shoves himself on hands and knees and then upright.

He needs to get to the officers.

He needs to check Burnett is still alive. (There's blood.)

He needs... He needs to get the (criminal) civilian out of the line of fire.

" _Karkat, cover me!_ "

He starts running, legs and lower back hurting under the strain already. Crowbar has bones made of his fucking namesake.

Grier yells something incoherent; a shadow falls across Dave again. Dave stumbles to the side trying to dodge, lands on his ass.

Karkat is staring, unmoving.

"Karkat!" Dave yells, and rolls on his back, hand raised.

The demon has an animal skull for a head and tall loosely-corkscrewing horns; its lower body is a long dolphin-fluked tail. From shoulders to waist, the body looks human.

The hands especially, as they plunge down on him all claws out.

Red thorns burst between the two of them; the demon eels gracefully to the side, flies away. It moves like it's swimming, except without the weight of water to drag it down to any reasonable kind of speed.

Karkat lands at his side in a shower of gravel and dust. Dave rolls back on all fours, grabs Crowbar under the armpits, drags him fast, trying to keep one eye on the sky.

 _Latula, tell me you can help my coworkers_ _now_ _._

 _Yeeeeah, looks like that is a thing I can do, now the bitch ain't hiding it._ She sounds peeved, offended that the demon managed to hide anything from her on her own terrain. Good; she'll work harder.

They manage to cross the street, run along the walls to where Detective Grier is trying to keep Officer Aguilar from blindly whaling on Maguire. She's not going at it half-hearted.

Karkat's eyes are wide and stunned and Dave has _no fucking time_ to slow down and ask him what the fuck is going on. He manages somehow to hop over an abandoned, toppled-over motorcycle and pull Crowbar after him in a way that will only give the dude bruised calves and scratched chins, he should count himself lucky.

After that he very deliberately headbutts O'Dell in the stomach to shove him back inside the alley -- the poor guy lands on his ass, still screeching. Dave passes him, drops Crowbar's unconscious body in a corner under a fire escape, and then returns to drag O'Dell as well. "Karkat, on watch! Keep it at bay."

God does O'Dell fight. _Latula!_

 _I need Karkat, dude!_ she reminds him.

Shit. Right. Okay, dragging O'Dell in the other direction now. He gets his legs kicked hardcore and an elbow driven mercilessly into his ribs. Lucky he had the same training classes as the dude, so he manages not to let go.

They trip, struggle, fall. Swearing between his teeth, Dave stretches out to slap his hand on Karkat's hip.

Contact.

Lava and rage and lakes of boiling blood, black, crumbling stone - obsidian, sharp and brittle both. It rushes through him, to the guy he's desperately trying to keep in a headlock.

O'Dell shudders, squirms weakly. Dave lets go, cautious, but the man only flips over on hands and knees to throw up on the ground.

"Get me the other officers," Dave orders tersely, and tries not to plan a trip back to that shop where Burnett disappeared.

Karkat is shivering as he stands his ground, scanning the air. Dave turns to put his back to him -- the alley has two ends after all -- and taps his headset.

"Control, this is Team B, do you copy?" No answer. "Harley? Harley. Need reinforcements pronto."

Crackle. "--eam A--converging on Team C's posit--gunfire and--"

Some more crackle, then nothing. Fuck. They'll know something is wrong in two to five minutes when Team B misses its next checkup, but Dave doesn't like his chances too much.

Grier and O'Dell haul Aguilar to Dave, kicking and screaming. O'Dell still looks greenish and sickly, and Grier's face is wrinkled up like he's trying to fight off a headache. The guy only has Class Threes at his disposal, none of them Mind; they're not gonna last long.

Aguilar misses Dave's junk by about two inches when she kicks out. Dave puts a hand on her bare neck and the other hand on Karkat, again.

"Mother of _God_." She stops moving, eyes wide, shakes her head incredulously. " _Jesus_ _fucking Christ_."

This went suspiciously well. "Verbal already? Great job, get me the last two. Grier, maybe you should go back on wa--"

O'Dell goes down again. The other two, still bewitched, turn up the sound to eleven. It's all the warning Dave gets before the demon falls out of the sky right on top of them, and then he's throwing himself back and throwing Damara's power at the thing -- _rot_ , you piece of _shit, rot_ \--

He lands on his ass, gets swatted to the side, tumbles out onto the street -- his arm (doesn't even hurt) coils everywhere, shit, shit, did Damara miss, she can't miss --

Karkat jumps for the demon's back and gets a short, torn-edged wing snapped open in his chest, flinging him against the wall, and then the demon is turning on Dave again and it's _huge_ , coils and horns and that dead skull head --

 _Die and release me right now_ , Damara snarls resentful when he yanks on her hard, when the demon twitches back, talons dulled, chipped with age.

Its skin isn't even damaged. _Is that all you can_ _ **do** __against him?!_

Behind it Karkat struggles to his feet, stumbles back down. The wall is cracked up to the second story, there's a weird hollow where the bricks were pushed out of alignment, it's like a demolition ball gently nudged it in preparation for razing it down.

It looks at its hand and then it shrugs, lifts its other hand.

And then Burnett swings her tire iron down right between its horns.

The cracking noise is gunshot-loud. The demon pitches forward -- she swings again, from the side to get at its temple from behind, and it lifts its arm to block and the arm makes a cracking noise instead. Doesn't break, demons are solid as fuck, but it'll hurt, and Dave forces Damara to grab hold of that crack and widen it hard, shard it up all over the fucking place, yeah, let's see you using it again.

"Move!" Karkat snarls. Dave dives back into the alley right over the coils of its bruise-colored dolphin tail a mere half-second before the red lines explode out again, opening long gashes along its side and tail, shredding one wing membrane to tatters.

It retreats -- almost lazily, coils itself on the ground on the other side of the road to watch them. Dave realizes that the (cow? horse?) skull isn't its head, that the demon merely uses it as some kind of jaunty, fashionable hat, horns exiting through the eye holes, but pieces of it have broken off and he can see part of its face.

It's smiling.

"Burnett?" Dave asks quietly, and doesn't let on how fucking glad he is not to be the detective in charge anymore (Logically Grier should be but he has his hands full keeping track of the officers, shit, they should have swapped -- but he's too weak to defend properly against a Class Four. Argh. Dave hates, hates, _hates_ being in command, all those lives in his hands and never a juggling pattern he can hold to be found.)

"Reinforcements?" she asks, tire iron still in hand. He wonders if she lost her gun or if she already knows it won't work.

Karkat pads his way out of the alley between them, limping, a wing hanging weird. Fucking shitty motherfuck piss-hell. That fucking demon injured his demon. Is it his shell -- his bone? His joint? For a second Dave is -- is sick with worry, mad with anger -- but he forces it down.

"Gonna be late," Dave replies, laconic as he can. The demon smiles a little bit wider.

"Hm." Burnett shrugs. "We can take him."

The demon laughs, silent, shoulders shaking with it. _YES_ , something says, purring its way around Dave's mind and down his throat like a rusty handsaw, grinding chunks out of him on the way down. _LET US BRING THE GLORY OF SLAUGHTER TO EACH MOTHERFUCKING OTHER, MY BROSIS IN HATRED._

"How can I refuse," Burnett says easily, when Dave can't even imagine speaking without bringing up blood and all that metaphysical broken glass he still feels is lodged in there.

 _It ain't!_ Latula tells him, and Dave knows that, thanks, but even as she works all those psychic hooks out of him, soothes away wounds that don't really exist, he still finds himself shaken. Nothing has ever gone through Latula's defenses before. Nothing. It doesn't matter the attack is weak, it's like he was going down his ladder and suddenly one of the steps that he knows by heart even in the dark decided to go missing.

 _No, no, don't you dare think that, firetruck, I'm here, he just startled me, won't happen again! Don't think that, you can't be thinking like that -- Dave,_ **_don't let me go!_**

Something bites his numb shoulder. Hard; it stings. "Oh my fucking god, if you let that asshole in I will kill you myself before he gets the chance," Karkat snarls as he stumbles against Dave's side.

His mouth is red with Dave's blood. He flinches in pain and Dave stares for a second before he thinks to say, "It's allowed. Uh. Thanks."

His shoulder isn't numb anymore. Neither is the arm the demon caught in its sweeping smash. Dave looks down and oh hey he's been bleeding, he's been clawed up, raked nice and deep from biceps to the back of his wrist, and also he's fairly sure his shoulder is just a bit out of its socket. Welp.

This is totally the appropriate time for fainting like a damsel, letting everything around him go weird-cottony. Where the hell is Latula. Can't let that happen--

Ow.

Okay, good news is now he's wide awake, and splendidly unmired in fear miasma.

Bad news is he's feeling every glorious detail of the state of his body. Shit.

"Strider? Need to tap out?"

"And miss the party? Fuck no, that'd be rude."

The skull demon uncoils almost lazily. _I WILL RELISH SMEARING YOUR SKULL MEATS ACROSS THIS FRESH HEAP OF GRAVEL_ , it purrs, but this time it doesn't hurt as bad. It's still like nails on chalkboard, but Dave doesn't feel the need to touch his ears to check for bleeding.

"Grier, call up Maelst, shield the alley. It won't hold, but it'll tell us if anything's coming. Strider, aim for its horns and eyes. Vantas, up front." Burnett takes a step forward. "I'll herd it into you."

"Oh my shitfucking hellgod you _are_ crazy," Karkat replies, which means Dave doesn't have to.

"Nah," she says, tone almost light. "But seriously, he wants to talk rage? I've got three teenagers."

... She is not calm at all. Or nothing Dave truly recognizes as calm, though he's seen it on other people. A hate, a desire to ruin something, someone so deep it comes out looking like pleasure. _I will tear out your entrails and I will_ ** _roll in them_** _and it will be so. Much. Fun._

Shit. Does he have to stop her? Is she even rational enough to make such decisions? She's in good shape for a woman over forty but she's still over forty, what the hell is she thinking she can do exactly?

Okay she can whale on things with a tire iron. He supposes.

He thought it was dirt and bruises and dried blood on her face but it's weird dark patterns instead and when he stares they shift around and _spread_. Weird as fuck how the demon effect seems to be happening under her skin instead of as an illusion overlay, the way sky-blue fur flickers around Grier.

Dave tries to mesh Damara closer but Latula is locked in and will not budge over to make space, and Damara's soul-slicing edges hurt too much for his own skin to take on the tarnished glaze of old, cracked porcelain.

_I RECOGNIZE YOUR THIRST, SISTER IN RAGEFUL HATRED._

"That's good." She takes a step forward and Dave gets to see her back, and her jacket is ruined, and so is her shirt; it's bad enough he can see bloodstained bra bits, her whole back is mincemeat, what the fuck did it throw her into in that shop?

_IN THE MIRTH AND THE WRATH AND ALL THINGS BLED ALL OUT, I SAY: BITCH, LET US KILL THE HOLY MOTHERFUCK OUT OF EACH OTHER._

"I thought you'd never ask."

Dave's reaching out to stop her and then a gust of wind hits him in the face, cuts him off from her. Grier grabs him by the arm that hurts less, tugs him backward; his carefully combed-back curls are whipping free of their hair band, he's got tufts of blue fur poking out from odd places.

"Why'd you--" Dave hisses, and Grier shakes his head, tense, jaw clenched.

"She's synched up. You stop her now, they'll wallop you and then go anyway."

 _Shit_. He's not sure he wants a perfect match anymore, if that bullshit goading each other into being both the best and the worst of themselves happens so easily. He can't believe she went with it.

"You're all fucking crazy, suicidal shit-brained imbeciles, a bunch of peerless--" Karkat is muttering endlessly under his breath, but he waits for a chance.

His red attack has been shown to pierce demon shell before. He can -- he _has_ to finish it in one go. But they can certainly wind it first.

Damara doesn't want to aim at Skull-Hat, skews Dave's aim right and left and fucking backward. Okay. Fine. She doesn't say shit when he aims her at his environment, so he is totally going to drop that billboard on its head.

He times it all right, watching the loose, graceful way the demon dodges and weaves around Burnett's attacks to make sure she won't be caught in it, and then just as he feels Damara give in, _Fine, I will do this_ , just as he sees rusted-still gears underneath missing pieces of porcelain appear on his wrist, Aguilar lands on his back and shoves him to the ground.

His arm hits hard, shoulder first (something goes click inside the joint), and then she grabs his wrist and wrenches it back and he can feel all his half-hearted scabs break, blood soaking his sleeve hot and thick. He gives a brief scream, tries to buck her off -- she punches him in the back of the head.

A gunshot cracks. Karkat stumbles.

His eyes are very wide, all four of them. Very surprised.

For a burning second Dave and Damara fit with a snap just like his shoulder ball and socket.

He wants flesh melting off yellowing bones, he wants rot crawling up this man's veins, this enemy. At the last instant he seizes the gun instead with their power, crumbles it into red metal dust. His face is still pressed into the pavement, pebbles digging in; he bucks. Nothing happens.

_Kill her. Hurt her. Make her be off you. She is helping them hurt what is yours--_

_Damara, I ain't fronting. If you don't shut your trap I'm going to kill you._

A gust of hard, compressed wind tumbles Aguilar off him; he pushes himself up on one hand, crawls to Karkat, oh fuck, oh no--

"I'm -- I'm fine. I'm. My head hurts."

Karkat's got blood all over the side of his face, there's a crease in his temple and up to the crown of his skull that goes to the root of his horn, there are chunks of bloody hair and spines stuck to his shoulder, strewn on the ground.

_IF ONLY YOU HAD MORE OF THE OOMPH, LIL NINJETTE. MOTHERFUCKING CUTE, THOUGH._

Grier has a fraction of second to choose between keeping the officers off them and catching Burnett as a sweep of that tail sends her flying across the street, in a trajectory that'll have her hitting at least the second story. He chooses to catch her, and then Dave is being run at again. Welch has a very non-regulation knife in hand.

He doesn't want to hurt his fellow officers. He doesn't want that.

He wants Karkat to stand still as he's getting beaten and stabbed to death because he's been ordered not to injure innocents even less.

He hopes they'll forgive him.

"-- _2, this is Control, stand clear!_ \--"

The space at his back warps and tears in a dizzying, oddly imprecise way. Jade?!

Shoes click on the floor -- and then claws.

"I hope you'll mind that we're crashing your party."

Dave chokes, blinks sightlessly at the officers, who stand swaying as for a brief instant the demon forgets to puppet them. "That's the wrong expression, sis, just saying. You forgot a pretty important little word there. It's 'I hope you _don't_ mind.'"

"No, Dave," Rose says, light and cold like the first snowflake of a storm, "I really hope he does."


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why is this chapter so huge aaaa. why was it so hard to write. *kicks it* anyway here it is. 
> 
> >:3

"Casualties?"

Dave shuffles his weight from knees to feet, straightens up. He tries not to move too fast; he's a bit dizzy. Blood loss, impacts with various hard surfaces, a severe case of emotional whiplash. His sister is at his back, a few feet away -- it's crazy how irrationally _safe_ he feels -- so he keeps watching the rookies.

They're still dazed, but Grier doesn't need prompting to pull up a second wind barrier, just in case the demon on the other side of the street stops feeling like allowing them to chew the fat.

"Burnett's out, so is Crowbar. The rookies are mindfucked. Grier?"

"No injuries." Dave is pretty sure the man has a series of very nice, deep bruises, but he's not gonna feel them properly until later anyway, so they don't count. Dave agrees with this philosophy. Yep.

"And Karkat's got a -- at _least_ adislocated wing and a probable concussion."

"Fuck you, my head's fine," Karkat mutters, which doesn't help; he sounds _listless_.

"You forgot someone, Dave," Rose says pointedly.

"... And lacerations on my arm." Which he needs to bandage the second he gets a minute, come to think of it, because it's not clotting fast enough and he's gonna get dizzy soon.

Anyway it _was_ dislocated; it's not anymore. He'll whine about the swelling later. (What _is_ it with his shoulders getting popped out all the friggin' time anyway, this is the second time since he summoned Karkat, it had better not become a _thing_.)

Claws tip-tap their careful way towards them on the pavement; Kankri goes, "Ah, Karkat, how are -- you're, um, are you aware that you're _bleeding_ , perhaps you did not--"

" _Move_ , asshole," Karkat rasps back, "I'm not allowed to shoot through you."

Kankri hurriedly scuttles to the side, between Karkat and Grier, who eyes him warily. Kankri looks disturbed. Dave doesn't have time to coddle his demon's demonbro, though --

"Do what Detective Strider tells you, Kankri," Rose orders.

Son of a bitch, she just saddled him with one more noncombatant. Kankri is going to be worse than useless; he's clumsy and ponderous, and those huge, ungainly wings are just one big Please Shred Here area.

Dave groans. If it's a way for Rose to make sure he doesn't wade into the fray himself while he's slightly dinged he's going to bite something.

_YOU AMUSE ME, LIGHTSISTER. BUT LESS AND LESS AS TIME PASSES FUCKING BY._

"My apologies. Shall we dance?"

He can't help but glance over his shoulder. Rose didn't bother to hide her Kevlar, she just has it strapped on over her blouse; her knee-length skirt is slit up to mid-thigh on the side and her heels are flat enough for good footwork, Bro wouldn't kick her in the head even a little bit.

She has a rapier in hand, one of those little matchstick swords, blade not even a whole thumb's length wide.

"She's a seer, right?" Karkat mumbles, staring. There's blood drying on his face. "That's just about the least active class apart from Sylph--"

"She'll be fine for a while," Dave replies, cutting him off, because -- "We need to move out of this fucking pincer attack already. Ideas?"

"Detective?" Kankri asks Grier. "Would you happen to have a healer at hand?"

Grier is busy holding the wind barrier to keep the officers back -- and they're starting to test it again, eyes still disturbingly empty. He doesn't even bother with words, he just snorts. There are tufts of blue fur all over him, but it's going more and more translucent as Dave watches and the skin that shows through is covered in sweat.

"Kankri," Dave orders, "stop distracting him, that's the last fucking thing we need right now."

"If Karkat was healed--"

"Yeah well he's not!" Dave throws back, and ends it there. "Grier, I'm going to guide you to the corner wall."

It'll be shitty cover, but anything is better than thin air.

Grier grunts vaguely; Dave steps behind him, wraps his non-hurting arm around his waist. There's tons of shit on the ground; if Grier trips Dave wants to be able to hold him up. The dude looks like having to walk _and_ cast would mean the ball got dropped into the nearest bottomless chasm.

His back tingles with how exposed he feels.

"Karkat, Kankri, on watch. Move with us. If we're in danger," he adds, for Kankri's benefit, " _warn me_."

"Soon enough for us to do something about it," Grier amends absently, and his hands shake. Dave repeats it, because that's a fairly good point and Kankri doesn't have standing orders to save Dave's life or lose his own.

They shuffle sideways like a bunch of awkward crabs. Dave's head is craned to look ahead; from the corner of his eye he sees Rose, vacillating like a flower in a gust of wind, dodging a rush of demon by mere inches. Her eyes are closed.

Dave says fuck it and picks Grier up entirely, takes four hurried steps across broken bricks, and (it hurts, it fucking hurts, his bloodied hand slips) deposits him _almost_ nicely at the corner.

Then like an asshole he presses his back against the wall behind Grier to use him as cover, at least from _that_ friendly fire problem.

The wind sputters some; Aguilar almost gets through. Grier slams her back into the alley, not very nicely, swears at himself under his breath. (It'd be so easy for him to blow them all through the wall instead.) Karkat and Kankri are crouched before them, bristled and tense. (Karkat's _wing_ , oh hell.) Dave scans the street.

Rose's sword is ridiculously thin, ridiculously breakable against a thick-skinned demon. The asshole must weigh four times her weight, at least. It's huge.

She drops low, lunges, scores a scratch along its belly, where its upper thigh should be. A white glow crackles off its thigh and up the blade, over the guard, seeps into her skin, but it's barely anything before the demon sweeps its clawed paw at her and she has to throw herself back. Claws flip her hair up in passing. Dave can't see if it touched her, if she's bleeding.

"Kankri--"

"Ah -- she might still keep it busy another few minutes, I think, but--"

"--With me. Karkat, protect Grier."

He starts running down the sidewalk. Kankri splutters behind him and then bounds awkwardly after him. "No, wait -- what are you --"

Dave lost his gun. (Again.) Dave needs a gun. Burnett, being KO, doesn't need a gun.

(Dave also needs to make sure Burnett hasn't gotten herself killed on his watch for the second time this mission.)

To the side the demon flips around with no warning, tail buzzing low to the ground like a mace. Rose jumps over it like she saw it coming (she did.)

Then she crosses her arms before her face, and gets thrown to the ground when the demon's following backhand hits right into her block. She rolls, once, twice, lands in a crouch. (Bro would be proud.) (Her back is going to be a giant bruise. Is her wrist broken?)

Dave screeches to a stop near Burnett, drops to a knee to check her pulse. Kankri huddles behind a knocked-down garbage bin -- too small, half of him sticks out. He catches Dave's dubious glance and bristles. "It might surprise you especially but pain is not something I find enjoyable yet--"

"Oh my god, shut up." Burnett is alive. Breathing.

She still has her gun. Awesome. It'll probably be useless against the demon, seems like it always fucking is, but somehow he thinks a clean bullet wound to the leg is preferable to giving his coworkers gangrene or bone rot courtesy of Damara, if he needs to stop them again. He pulls it out of her holster.

She's face down on the pavement. "Can you see if moving her will aggravate a broken back or what?" he asks without too much hope. Kankri sniffs disdainfully.

"Her spine is intact. I may not be able to tell you where all the contusions are without a closer look, but I believe I would recognize blood flow being disrupted in such a major part of the body."

"Awesome. You get to carry her."

Kankri stiffens, then flares his wings meaningfully. " _How?_ Not to berate you on your anthropocentric tendencies but I am a _quadruped_ , which means I need my front limbs for locomotion, and my back and especially my neck spines do not exactly lay flat!"

Dave unbuttons and drops his (expensive, ruined) jacket, unzips his Kevlar vest. Snaps his fingers, points where he wants Kankri. (Something hits a wall hard on the other side of the street; long-broken windows rattle, let loose some more tinkling splinters.)

He drapes his open Kevlar vest down Kankri's back one-handed, steps across Burnett's hips, grabs her under the armpits to lift her up. (Ignores his shoulder. Prays she doesn't have internal bleeding. No, Kankri would know.) He settles her face down on his back, legs dangling on both sides of his hips, sides braced by Kankri's wings so she won't roll off. Her arms are pressed to her sides from shoulder to elbow.

One of her sleeves is pulled up.

Light floods the whole street, making him flinch, close his eyes; he's almost blind. "God damn it, Rose, a little warning?" he protests, blinking, fingers running down Burnett's arm. Kankri is already starting to move, to slink back toward the relative safety of Karkat and Grier; it's awkward, Dave's fingers are stiff and tacky with half-dried blood.

The Rage demon is standing still, chin tucked in, arms spreading in cautious arcs to feel its surroundings. Rose crouches right in the loose coil of its tail, two inches away from contact. She tilts her head Dave's way, without looking.

Dave closes the fingers of his good arm around Burnett's nice little wind-up watch and throws like he's playing baseball.

There is no fucking way in hell Damara will resist _that_.

 _I wish much your male parts rot,_ Damara says pleasantly, and explodes the watch into glass and metal shrapnel just before it touches the demon. The explosion rocks it forward, shreds a handful of holes in its wings; blood splashes along its back. Rose dives out from under it just as it pitches forward and catches itself on the ground with both hands. It feels her pass, she can't help touching it, but she stumbles to the side and out of reach.

The damage from the exploding watch will be too shallow to be a real bother, Dave knows, but it's good enough for now. His sister stabs at its unprotected side, retreats out of range fast; still blinking black spots out of his vision, Dave runs after Kankri.

The officers are still puppety-mindfucked when they get back, of course. Like anything could miraculously unfuck itself while his back was turned. Shit only rolls downhill.

He's just glad nothing's gotten worse.

"If Karkat were healed," Kankri is saying as they come to a stop next to Karkat and Grier -- _again_ , as if Dave were hiding a healer up his asshole just to spite his own motherfucking injured demon; "--then I would feel comfortable suggesting he may go to them to -- ah, thank you -- to fix the problem."

Dave lays Burnett down as close to the wall as he can, to provide a minimum of cover, and then he pulls his Kevlar off Kankri's back. There are a few slices in it, but it's still more protection than his shirt gives him; it goes back on. (It almost doesn't. His arm _hurts_.)

"--but as it is they would only injure him again."

Karkat growls and his back spines flick and rattle in annoyance. His eyes are still on Rose, though. Good demon, best sentinel. Dave hears slithering noises and feels the edges of some disturbing voodoo shit brushing down his metaphorical spine before Latula bites it off, but this time he adamantly refuses to turn and look. He trusts Rose. He trusts her with his _life_ , case in point.

"What do you want me to do, taintfuck, channel Latula? Yeah, that's really fucking useful, when it stops the second I take my hands off their gross fleshy--"

He goes brutally silent. Kankri huffs, long tail lashing nervously. "We've been gone _this_ long -- have you _only just_ caught my point?"

"Oh, fuck you, I'm concussed." But Karkat doesn't look back at Kankri, or growl; he hunkers down, like he's trying to make himself smaller. "I just--"

Dave is pretty much lost. But if they have _anything_ that might work --

(Rose grunts. Impact. Something hits the ground.)

(She's laughing. He doesn't turn around.)

He opens his mouth to order Karkat to talk, forcing his mind to bring up the shape of his demon's soul, and he knows he'll hate himself because he's going to take Karkat's secrets from him, but he'll hate himself later, if they're still alive.

"Hey, nubwingz," is what comes out instead. Latula is coiled tight around him, steel all the way through. He _could_ shove her off but he's startled enough that he lets her. "You took that badge, din't ya."

Karkat twitches, almost looks up at Dave/Latula.

" _Those are your brother officers now, you dig?_ "

"--Oh." A pause. And then he _flips around_ to face the men (must hurt, careful with that wing, fuck) and he snaps; "Master!"

 _Huh_. "Yeah?"

"Permission to inflict mild harm?"

Dave can not fucking figure out what even is the plan, but he pulls on obsidian ruins and boiling blood and ancient rage all the same and says "Granted."

(If he wastes time defining "mild" and "this time only" they will die. Bro is still going to tan his hide.)

Dave doesn't have time to say anything else; Karkat grits his teeth and leaps, mostly over Grier's barrier. The wind catches him and throws him ahead faster than he planned for; he rams Welch down (tears streaming down her blank face, so creepy.)

Then she tries to push Karkat off her, and he -- oh _fuck_ , he sinks all his teeth through her uniform jacket and into her forearm. Dave didn't expect -- he's bouncing off her next, snatching O'Dell by the ankle -- pulling him down on his ass, jaws clamping onto the meat of his upper arm, and then Maguire turns to him and tries to grab him.

The idiot tries to grab Karkat by the _hair_ , which ends up with a lot of surprise prickle holes on his hand, and then of course Karkat snaps his fangs closed on his leg just above the knee -- dude, when Karkat said mild _harm_ he wasn't kidding on the actual harm part -- Maguire's leg goes out under him, he lands on his ass. And then --

The gun is in Dave's hand and aimed before he can think. " _Karkat!_ "

Aguilar lands on Karkat's back before Dave can aim, and Karkat _yowls_. Fuck, his hurt wing -- fuck, fuck, _mild_ harm; the way she jerks, Dave has visions of Karkat cutting her open down the middle. Karkat throws himself on the ground and to the side to crush her under his armored weight, kicks himself free. He rolls off her, shakes his head, stumbles up; her thighs and arms are scratched up and the cloth over her own Kevlar is in tatters. Dave can't believe her guts are still in.

Karkat dives for her throat, pins her under his weight, and she's been the most active of the mindfucked but if she were entirely herself this would be a really bad plan, even if Karkat has no dick to knee up into his abdominal cavity. She's not; his head comes down--

He looks back up at Dave and he has blood all over his mouth, his cheeks are splattered; his eyes shine like lamps at night.

"Take down the barrier!" Karkat snaps even as he charges it.

Grier does, wind scattering and dying in sad wisps. The officers behind Karkat are stumbling back up on their feet, zombie style. Aguilar's shirt collar is torn half-off, there's a bleeding bite mark high on the side of her neck -- Karkat bit her (Karkat has only ever bitten him) and what the fuck is he even--?

He leaps like a cricket, lands almost on Dave's feet, grabs his wrist -- the one that hurts.

"Let me feed!" he yells through Dave's pain, even as Grier stumbles back to dodge O'Dell's sudden lunge.

"Yes," Dave says, gun dangling unused in his other hand, mind blank with hurt.

A hot tongue presses against the claw marks the demon left down his arm; oddly, it burns. The shreds of his sleeve soak up blood on Karkat's face and he wastes a vague, fleeting thought for the potential contamination. Hope the officers are up on their shots.

Aguilar stumbles to a stop as he's raising the gun to kneecap her.

Latula is crooning, wound all tight around his bond to Karkat, his bond to...

There are flickers in his mind, one two three _four_ , too faint and too muddled for a Name and he can't _pull_ on them, there's no demon energy to get at -- but the more blood Karkat licks up, the clearer they get.

Karkat has their blood. Karkat has _them_.

Holy fuck _yes_.

"You can _do_ that?"

Upper eyes narrowing in warning, Karkat nips him in between two hungry licks. Okay, so the question was stupid.

_It really was. Wowzers. This is the_ _bomb_ _. So many mad tasty brainz!_

_Latula, grrl, if you nibble on them even just a little I'm gonna get pretty unchill on your hellacious tail end._

_Haha, just jerking your chain, peace._ She purrs in his mind, coils around their unaware presences like a snake around its eggs. Dave represses a smile.

Kankri is looking past the two of them and all his eyes are wide with sheer essence of oh fuck.

At first Dave doesn't even register it's a car. He sees _huge_ and _flying at us_.

His hand rises up.

Something that's both blood and lava rushes through veins he doesn't truly have, comes out shrouded in blizzard ice and decay and destruction, comes out in nothing his eyes can see.

He sees the car unravel into bare struts and curling plastic, panels dissolving in the blink of an eye. It rains rust on his face. A half-eaten engine lands before his feet and topples toward his toes.

(Karkat's mouth comes off his skin with a little wet pop.)

"Back!" one of the officers yells, and " _Dave!_ " Rose screams, and coils and coils of bruise-colored skull demon fall at him from the sky.

Red thorns bloom, tight and focused; the demon barrel-rolls out of the way. Dave shoves the gun into his holster, searches his pocket for watches he doesn't -- oh, Welch, face still streaked with tears, slapping an electronic watch into his hand, and her cell phone; " _It tells the time, right?!_ "

He's never tried it. (New smartphone; he hopes Expenses pays her back.)

Rose is running at them, sword shorter by three inches. The blade snapped jagged; doesn't mean it'll be useless now, though it might need a little more effort to do the stabbity thing. But when she's not against an opponent, she can't -- he sees her stick a thumb under the blindfold that cuts across her face, lift it to watch her footing. (He hadn't even noticed she was fighting blindfolded, but how else, with Terezi.)

The demon feints at Karkat again, is kept at bay by a burst of slick red vines (it occurs to Dave that they're made of blood. Huh.) Dave uses the second it gives him to look back; Detective Grier is barking orders, an arm around Welch's neck for support. O'Dell and Aguilar are hauling Detective Burnett's limp body back to the alley, where Crowbar is still lying unconscious. Dave doesn't have time to check what Maguire thinks he's doing, standing there dumbly.

Kankri is crouched half behind Maguire's legs and staring at the fight, pupils blown huge, expression odd in a way Dave doesn't have time to define, because then the skull demon makes another pass and Dave flings the cell phone at him.

Damara scoffs -- until Dave reminds her, "Hey, _calendar function_ ," and by then the demon is already flying over the cell phone, clattered harmlessly to the ground, and it detonates right under its long grey belly.

Dave dodges to the side as Skull flips over in mid-air and almost knocks him and Karkat down. It lands on its back hard -- it's not floating _now_ , huh, fucker. Dave cocks his good arm to throw the watch, and Rose rushes by him, eyes closed, eyebrows knit, elbows him hard in the side, and that snake-dolphin tail comes swinging down as the demon does a very improbable backflip, missing his head and her side by less than an inch.

"What does it _take_ ," Dave starts, and Rose yells, "Karkat _now_!"

He's on the other side of the demon from them; for a heartbeat he hesitates, but Rose glares at him with red burnt-out eyes and he attacks. Dave watches the vines rushing straight at them.

Karkat pulls it, of course, wary of hitting Dave -- and the demon does something weird, tilting its head into it, and then holy fuck _unfair_ the vines aimed for its head and torso glance right the fuck off its skull hat instead of gouging tunnels through its fucking smug face.

Blood flies anyway -- tail and shoulder, the already useless arm. The demon's body swings back.

Rose is there. The blade finds a fleshy hollow between spine and shoulder blade; she puts her weight into it.

Bro would be so fucking proud.

It should die. It should let itself be impaled through the heart. It twists; the blade skips aside, rips through drowned-gray flesh, snaps on a rib.

The ghostly spider legs that were winding in a string of white light along the blade flinch, curl fast behind Rose's back.

Dave has Rose by the Kevlar and is hauling her off on blind instinct, but the string doesn't break, even as ink and night-mist come pouring along the length.

" _Master!_ " he hears, and he can't even tell if the horrified cry comes from Kankri or Karkat's throat.

 _Latula!_ he yells; he knows he needs Karkat too but he's all the way around and what if Dave could suck that hideous stain out, like some people imagine they can do with snake venom; it's bad, it's wrong, it's a spreading stain on his sister's chest and he can't -- no.

_Don't! Dave, don't, oh shit, Karkat!_

_WELCOME, SISTER_ , it purr-laugh-rasps right through Dave -- right through Rose, and her eyes snap open wide and Terezi's red is nowhere in them.

Son of a bitch knocked them out of sync.

(Son of a bitch did worse than that.)

He lobs his last watch at the demon, makes Damara make the pavement crack open under it, so the long-abandoned sewer hole breaks open and it falls ass first into it, clawing at the edges to keep from dropping all the way down. Then he grabs his sister by the waist and hauls her back.

She's still and quiet and her eyes are mild. She's smiling, barely, dreamily.

(He's seen her smile like this once before. She promised him it would never happen again.)

Only about a hand's length of blade left on that sword; he leaves it in Rose's hand.

He picks up the tire iron.

He's starting to get really fucking sick and tired of the skull mask and the way the asshole uses it to smirk behind and almost as much of the way he uses it to deflect Karkat's attacks, sick and tired of the strained look on his own demon's face (Karkat's attacks have less and less spines every time and there's all that drying blood on his face, on his little horn.)

The metal is heavy, but the balance is workable, so long as Dave keeps the bend aimed back. He grabs the end of the tire iron with both hands, thumbs set just right, and he sweeps in low.

It feels the first swipe coming somehow, turns ahead of it to face him, and the bend of the iron whistles past its face. Dave steps into his attack, reverses his momentum. Crack. It's not a proper pommel but it _is_ a proper cheekbone and they impact gorgeously. The demon's head flies back. Dave turns his straight thrust along the length of the (not a blade) into a swing.

It's heavy. It's perfect. Bone breaks, explodes on impact. Shards fly. Dave brings the iron back into position for a fourth go.

It does have a face underneath!

He wants to beat that thing to death.

 _Get your grimy claws out of my goddamn ride already!_ Latula roars.

Dave was not minding the rage so much, actually. Boo.

Whatever; calm is better. He leans his mind into Latula's grip, lets her armor his resolve, wind numb steel down the screaming nerves of his injured arm.

It recoils from him (like Dave _scared_ it, like it couldn't have lazily danced its way out of this one), propels itself out of reach. Karkat lands all claws out on the crumbling edge of the hole, hissing, and they both pivot on the spot to give chase.

Aguilar pops out of the alley behind it, catches Dave's eye, and flings her handful at the demon. " _Sir!_ " Damara locks onto the cell phone with resentful eagerness; Dave explodes it, rocking the demon forward, herding it into Karkat's attack.

More blood flows. The fucking thing is still moving, still floating with no wings involved, like gravity is for plebes. Dave hefts the tire iron.

Its cheekbones are high and sharp and its lips have something weird going on. It looks blank, removed, thoughtful, _not in pain_. Fucking irritating.

And then it smiles a close-mouthed, slow, sinuous smile. _THAT'LL DO._

It flips itself around and rushes the alley.

"Fire!" Grier yells, his own gun up. Even as Dave and Karkat dive to the side for cover Dave can feel the demon scratching at the officers in his mind, a sick feeling rising to smother the small glows of them, but Latula snorts and burns it all off them. It has to twist in the air to dodge the barrage of bullets, and fuck yes, if it relied on mindfucking people's aim off that means bullets _will_ do something --

Kankri is huddled there by the mouth of the alley and he's staring straight past the other demon, past Dave and Karkat, and he looks -- Dave doesn't have time to tell, because the enemy demon swoops down and grabs two handfuls of his folded down, too-big wings and snatches him right up.

"Eiyagh!"

" _Kankri!_ "

Kankri screeches, body twisting, tail lashing like a snake -- but they're up to the first floor and then the second, and no one can shoot without risking hitting his bared, unarmored underbelly.

Karkat is a hissing, crackling noise factory beside him; Dave himself just -- there's no way they can race up the fire escape in time to do jack shit --

Kankri's blindly flailing tail hits the fire escape, making it clang all the way down, where Crowbar and Burnett are hidden. He winds and wedges the spiny end of his tail around a railing, yelling in pain when the enemy demon gives a good yank to dislodge him, tries to grab a better hold with his toes.

"Keep doing that, Kankri Vantas," Rose orders from behind them, in a voice that makes the hair rise up on Dave's neck.

When he glances back over his shoulder he finds her on her knees, chalk in hand, a circle sketched on the asphalt around her.

"Master!" Kankri screeches, as the demon gives him another shake. At least it's got Kankri by the wing joints, not the membrane; they'd be long torn off otherwise, but -- shit, his wings would be even easier to break than Karkat's. "Master, it's trying to -- ow!"

Dave finds a parabola hanging off the edge of the roof, crushes the screws still holding it up to nothing; it lands on the tip of the demon's long horns, jarring them, and Kankri yanks one of his own wings free and beats it frantically to get himself closer to the fire escape landing. Clinging with all his limbs, he manages to pull himself over the railing and tumbles headfirst into it.

"Belly up!" Karkat yells at Kankri, who stares back dazedly at him for a whole second before he flings himself onto his back with a screech and O'Dell and Aguilar open fire. Dave is prepared to hear bullets dinging off the fire escape, off Kankri's shelled back, but the officers aren't ready to aim that close; the demon flows to the top of the fire escape and winds its long body down the stairs, so Kankri will be between it and the guns.

Dave watches Kankri kick frantically with his long murderclaw toes to keep it at bay, and he tries to find something he can destroy to give him a chance but won't crumble the fire escape on his colleagues. But he's too far away to throw a watch he doesn't have and there's nothing else in range; his own phone is gone from his pocket, lost somewhere in this mess.

Behind him the words tumbling out from Rose's lips are the cool, weightless void of space overhead, majestic and immense, and underneath a planet tumbling, storms and wildfires and the sea swallowing wide enough swathes of land to be seen from orbit.

"Master, _it plans to disincarnate us!_ "

The planet turns and a trail of rocks turn with it like a wedding veil, rising from a crater that chews through the crust to the lava underneath.

 _Jesus tapdancing fuck_. What the _hell_ did she just call up?!

What the hell does Kankri mean by "us" -- oh duh, only two other incarnate demons here, only one Kankri might feel himself belonging to an "us" with.

Yeah, like fuck that's going to happen. "Oh, like _hell_ you will--"

"Break off the top of the staircase," Rose says. Dave jerks; she's standing just behind his shoulder. Electricity runs up and down her body in deceptively slow waves and her eyes glow weird colors.

And it'd be fine, it'd be whatever, it'd be _good_ \-- this demon seems ridiculously overpowered -- only the expression on her face is cold and empty and her power feels wrong when it brushes against him in a way he cannot explain.

He just -- there is no wry humor in this Rose, there is no teasing, no secret insecurities about how much she means to the people she loves. There's just cold rage and premeditated murder and possessiveness.

"Do it, Dave."

He does it. Heart in his throat, he does it, Karkat crouched low beside him, all spines up.

She lifts her hand and then slices it down and the mess of broken-off metal bars plunges down like a rain of spears and _holy fuck they still have people underneath!_

He shoulders her aside, disrupts her hold, crushes it all to fine dust one floor over the ground. Maguire splutters out a protest, rust in his mouth. Dave turns on his sister.

"What's _wrong_ with you?!" (Like he doesn't know.)

"It's escaping," she says, and doesn't even look at him with her weird flashing eyes, like his words have as much importance and meaning as a mosquito fart in the breeze.

He looks up and sure enough it's grabbing Kankri again, yanking him off the now roof-less landing.

It's going to kill him. (Disincarnate him. Not very much of a difference, is there.) And then it'll go for Karkat.

Karkat, who's crouching there shivering faintly, with his twisted wing and bleeding skull, with his cracked shell at the joint that reminds Dave of a crab in the process of being dismembered and eaten.

"That chimney," he tells Rose, pointing at one farther down the alley, and crumbles the lowest layer of bricks from the roof so she can lift it and try to brain the skull demon with a sweep of her hand when it tries to escape with Kankri down that way.

It twists in the air, banging Kankri's legs against a wall in passing, rushes back straight at them, at the street where it'll have more space to dodge. Rose's crackling intensifies -- the street breaks around her, an old fire hydrant goes clang like something broke inside and it's about to come loose; power zaps Dave's leg, dances along Karkat's horns and makes him flinch. She's still staring up at her target, still chasing it with the chimney separated into individual flying bricks, and Dave isn't surprised when they start raining.

" _Stop her stop her stop her_ ," Kankri is screaming at the top of his lungs, even as a brick narrowly misses his forced-open wing. Dave waits --

A brick hits the Rage demon in the shoulder blade, hard; Kankri screams and struggles some more, and the demon loses his grip entirely.

They're still two stories up.

" _Wings, dipshit!_ "

Kankri's wings flutter at Karkat's yell -- he has no clue how to angle them, how to hold -- and he drops a whole story before the breeze catches. After that he's gliding at an angle instead of plummeting straight down -- bit of an improvement, Dave guesses -- and trying desperately to slow himself down before he hits the wall. Dave cranes his head to follow him as he passes over their heads.

Rose is still methodically stoning the shit out of the other demon.

Which might be fine, if she did it any other way. The bricks are too small to finish it fast, the damage piles up too slow on it and too fast inside her; not worth it, even if he could calculate that coldly.

He hears the impact of someone running flat into a wall, glances back to see Kankri screech down the last meter of brick, all claws out, and then land on his ass.

"Ow, ow, ow--"

Not badly hurt. Okay.

"Karkat, _bite Rose_!"

He has to yell it fast, to throw power into his words in a way he hasn't really done before because they can't even afford the half-second it would take Karkat to hear and understand the order.

Karkat lunges, eyes wide open, startled. Rose's hand is already raised, crackling, _bleeding_ reality-rending power; Dave slaps her wrist back (ow fuck) and then Karkat's teeth find her forearm; he brings her down under his weight, almost knocks Dave down in passing.

Dave stuffs the tire iron in the back of his belt and raises Burnett's gun to cover Kankri, eyes on the twisting, flowing figure in the sky.

He also steps on Rose's sword to keep it pinned down. Because, yeah, no, no stabbing his fucking demon, Karkat is injured enough as it is, okay, and he does love his sister but he will be _so very fucking cross with her_. Not talking until next Christmas level of cross.

" _He is a tool for you to use,_ " something says blunt and cold and not-Rose (except for all the parts that are so Rose they hurt.) " _He is a tool for you to use and you are misusing him and stopping me from using mine._ "

He blinks and black ruins and blood are pooling in craggy hollows like a tide sped up ten times, cutting off the -- tower? That was a tower, _is_ a tower, with dragons hovering who cannot land (only one of them is Latula) and they're in _space_ and okay yeah never mind trying to make sense of fucked up demon landscapes, what was he thinking.

At least whatever Rose called up can't also fight them in a mindscape. Can it?

 _Not paid for this bullshit,_ something says _, can't be bothered_.

 _Not when he'd lose!_ something else cackles, almost affectionately.

_Like hell I would, Teezee. I would basically ruin the shit out of you. No hard feelings._

There's a dizzying rush (falling from the sky, the broken tower growing huge until he can see nothing else but the shadows at the bottom of the shaft) and Latula says _Sorry Dave, I'm gonna have to go pretty deep_ , and then Terezi laughs and everything goes black, everything goes _quiet_.

It's damp and cool like a cave on his metaphorical skin, water plinking off far away and the rasp of scales on rocks as something huge crawls closer to him from no angle he can figure out.

_Shh, coolkid, you do smell delicious but if I ate you she would destroy me. Even if I only nibbled a little!_

_If I didn't get there first,_ Karkat says from right behind him, only when Dave looks back it's a puddle of blood-red lava, flowing on his footsteps.

(Its glow is so weak though, it's cooled down to black stone in so many places.)

( _I'm fucking fine, I am a towering figure of fine, mind your own fucking business._ )

 _So what are we even doing?_ it occurs to him to ask. Because yeah, Dave trusts Latula, no problem, but he's got a situation going on outside his head to keep track of too...

Latula answers him, distracted; _It was harder last time but it's about the same,_ and then at his raised pseudo-eyebrow _S'okay if you don't remember, I know trauma does weird shit to your fleshy hardware_.

Oh. Right. Yeah.

_'Oh right yeah' what?! Spit it out! Fucking shit, I hate being thrust blind into a clusterfuck and then ordered right and left by a brain-rotten moron who has no clue how to best deploy me, and I don't even get enough intel to figure it out myself!_

Dave would blink, if he had eyes right now. _Oh. Right. I think she means how I met her._

Karkat would bite if he wasn't just as limited as Dave, he's sure. As it is the lava bubbles irately.

 _I remember Rose fiddling with spells she should have left alone, mostly, and then I think I tried to get in the middle and then things got hella dicey and I ended up trying to haul her bodily out of her pentacle mid-summoning. Yeah,_ Dave muses, _that part is pretty clear._

_And then you died gruesomely, oh wait, I forgot logic and the laws of natural selection don't apply to you._

He really should have. No idea why he didn't.

_And then it hurt like a bitch which I've mostly blotted out and then I vaguely remember summoning blind while playing a whole Name Your Price fanfare at top volume in the ether, and somehow I won the jackpot and Latula popped out. Now where's the fucking exit in this messed up labyrinth -- no offense, Terezi, it's a hella cool messed-up labyrinth -- and where are we even going?_

_Oh, I think we'll be there soon,_ Latula says, vaguely ominous, and then adds, ostensibly for Karkat's spluttery, disbelieving benefit, _What Firetruck kicked out of his brainspace was that due to the mad tangly action he and Rosy-Posy got going on at the soul level, she can't invert her alignment without flipping him along._

Dave arches a theoretical eyebrow. Maybe even both eyebrows. _... What, seriously?_ Of course he knew that a pair of twins' auras are naturally a bit more entangled than what's usual for family, but to this point?

_Thing is, he hasn't got the right brain setup for it, so she'd just do a lot of shattering._

The labyrinth cracks and a shaft of light blinds the fuck out of him.

 _Finally!_ he hears from afar, a new voice. _Can you even imagine how long I waited here like a chump for you to come through? Laaaame!_

Yet another broad, goddamn, he is buried in broads. Terezi is apologizing insincerely to the voice around a snicker -- Vriska? Too bitchy for Aranea, so probably Vriska.

They come out and it's a desert outside, arid and flooded with painful light, spangled with incongruous spider webs. Ruby drops bead on silk strands like bloody dew.

In the middle there is a wrong, so wrong crack of not-Roseness, the demon who is the cold of space watching the end of the world from orbit wrapped in ragged swathes around -- around...

 _You probably should not attempt to memorize her Name,_ Kankri says, dryly apologetic, _flesh interferes so dreadfully with such things,_ and nudges him away. Up and... out, and... _There is still one thing you must do, which I cannot advise you about. Good luck, Detective._

Down/inside there, lava is burbling onto dry sand and seeping in, melting holes through it, acrid smoke everywhere. He blinks and he's still in the street with his gun out tracking the demon flying lazy loops overhead and Kankri is still shaking himself and climbing back onto his feet.

He flicks him a glance, but Kankri just said he couldn't tell him what he needed to do. Why would he -- as a Seer isn't it his job to give them heads up?

Unless he's ordered not to -- oh.

Kankri takes a couple of hesitant steps in their direction and then starts running as fast as he can across the broken street, and Dave waits for the son of a bitch up there to dive at Kankri, but it doesn't. It's not leaving either, no matter that it got hurt, so it still has business with them ( _it's planning to disincarnate us!_ ), but--

"Strider!" one of the uniforms calls from the alley. "Crowbar's going into convulsions!"

... Shit. The demon's draining him dry. Poor stupid asshole, what kind of ridiculous loophole did he leave in the contract for that to happen?

Kankri screeches to a stop and the weight of his tail and wings almost upends him ass over head; he stares up at Dave, eyes burning with impatience and mouth pursed pointedly closed.

What is Dave supposed to do? Kankri can't tell him, but wants him to know, so it's not a demon secret, so it's a Rose secret?

A Rose order.

Rose ordered Kankri to obey Dave, too.

Her absolutes, he can't countermand, but the rest --

But what should he --

(" _Let me feed!") (Karkat has their blood. Karkat has **them**._ )

"Kankri, stand still, let it happen," he says, because he's not sure Kankri will be able to obey anything more aggressive toward his Master, and then -- should he use his fingers? No, he can't, he needs to keep targeting the demon.

Okay then. He hopes Kankri doesn't bite Karkat's fingers off.

"Karkat, feed him Rose's blood."

"Oh good jolly chucklefuck, I'm kind of holding onto someone here, but never mind!" Karkat snarks, as he pulls his blood-painted mouth off Rose's forearm, and immediately pins her wrist down with all his weight when she tries to go for his eyes.

He considers his busy hands for a second, and then he grunts and says "oh well," and he leans in and tilts his head and licks Rose's blood into Kankri's mouth.

Dave tears his eyes away, though he can't tear his ears away from the little wet noises he -- _holy shit_.

... Unf.

_Latula, grrl? This enough?_

She laughs through his mind, voice floating in from far away. _Double-trouble blood **and** Blood **and** Mind on top? Bro, I'mma anchor that shit so tight it ain't ever gonna budge again._

_Oh. Yeah, do that. I am in favor of that plan. That plan is now the favored child, all other plans are now redheaded stepchildren and banished to the cupboard under the stairs. The non-wizardly one. Okay where was this metaphor going again._

She does it, she grabs Dave's bond to Rose, and Kankri and Karkat's bonds to them and to each other, she... he can't track what she does, but 'anchoring' seems a good word for it.

Karkat has broken the -- does it count as a kiss? was it even more than licking? -- the _blood transfer_ _thing_ and is now fussily licking his own lips clean. Kankri wipes at his own face with the back of armored knuckles, delicately.

Rose has gone still on the ground. Dave tries to stop cursing the fates that gave him such a bad angle of view on the Vantascest cannibal-fashion make-out session.

"Sis? Back with us?"

"This is where I go 'But I never left you' in a sepulchral tone, isn't it?" she replies drily, blinking at the sky. "What's the Prince of Rage doing?"

Oh, it's a _Prince_ of Rage. Cool. No wonder they've been fucked over so deep. Princes are all utter dump trucks full of assholes, case in point: Bro and Dirk. "Charging its lasers outta Crowbar's battery," Dave replies laconically, and switches his gun to a one-handed hold so he can rest his other arm. Keeping them aimed up for long is harder than it seems it should be.

Rose sits up gingerly, massaging her temples. "And we had better not rely on my luck, I am being informed that flipping alignments and then channeling a Doom demon, I quote, pissed it all back out, you dumbass, end quote."

"... That was _Sollux_?"

"Mnh."

"Remind me to be glad he keeps it to consulting usually." Fuck. He's the kind of demon who doesn't even _like_ to leave a summoning circle. As a rider he's mildly terrifying; what would he have been incarnate?

Moot anyway, because Dave got Karkat instead. He's never going to be sorry.

The Prince of Rage is still hovering up high, out of bullet range. Still not leaving, though.

"So," he says. "What now?"

Rose has no answer for him.

He offers his hand to pull her to her feet as she climbs back up. She wobbles.

When Dave calls out for an update he's told Crowbar's shakes have started dying down, in a tone that means they would have preferred he kept it up. Wordlessly, Rose pulls a little mirror out of her skirt pocket, catches the light with it -- a patch of it dances around the demon's face; it doesn't even deign to squint -- and shatters it under her foot. Dave wishes he had a watch left.

_Hey, Damara, would you take life expectancy like Aradia did that one time?_

_Out of the Knight of Blood I would not. Yours or fuck off._

Welp. Alright then.

Up there, the Rage demon floats slowly to a roof and lets itself rest on it, the first hint that floating around costs it any power at all. It's still staring down at them, barely sparing a little glance here and there for the group in the alley.

Karkat picks up what's left of the rapier by the handle and offers it up wordlessly. Rose blinks down at him.

"Thank you. What will you want in exchange?"

"You not to get my master killed. Fuck but for such a supposed smart person, you're slow."

Rose snorts, pushes a lock of displaced hair out of her face. "Bear with me, this has been pretty tiring."

Dave nods slowly. "Yeah, huh, we're all pretty exhausted... It's gonna have to be a one-shot KO."

Alright, maybe a two-shot. All of Dave's limbs are still on. It's pretty hard to plan for loss of limb and-or severe magical exhaustion, which is the next step down the road they're on. Or they could misstep and roll all the way down to whoops dead. That could also happen. Mmh.

He vaguely wishes he'd let Rose keep syncing with Sollux.

He'd never have gotten her back, though. Not his Rose. Inverting, after all, means breaking off everything of yourself that doesn't fit.

"Heh. We're so fucked."

Karkat bumps his side into Dave's thigh, pointedly rough.

"This is where it's going, isn't it," Kankri mutters from where he's hunkering down behind them.

He shakes himself, looks up, brows pulled down, upper eyes narrowed into slits.

"Very well! Master?"

"What -- have you Seen something?"

"No."

She lets out a short sigh. "So then--"

The demon uncoils from its huddle on the roof. Back in the alley someone starts swearing, a low, endless litany of _fuck, fuck, no, come on, fuck_.

"Do you remember that time you were wondering if as a Seer I had any ability akin to Karkat's merging of other magic with his own, within certain parameters?" Kankri says, so fast and breathless that at first Dave doesn't even understand the words.

But Rose goes still beside him. Oh.

"You weren't either incarnate or riding at that time," she says, spine gone tense -- not with nerves, with adrenaline, Dave can feel it like an echo in the way his own heart kicks up, in the way Karkat's head jumps to stare at his demon bro straight on.

The rage demon flows lazily over the edge of the building and starts wafting down.

"It did not mean I was not keeping track of you -- listen, I wouldn't share if I saw any other way out, for you or for us, so _will you accept already?_ "

Dave shoots at the demon (he thinks he sees a tear open in its small, useless wing membrane. Woo.)

" _Yes_ ," Rose says, tense and excited (how the fuck can she still be excited now, Dave just wants to crash and sleep for three weeks and too bad if he's missing the learning opportunity of the century.)

The officers have dragged half of a rusted-into-pieces dumpster to the mouth of the alley as a crude barricade and they open fire in a nice rolling pattern when it banks for them. Dave hip-checks his sister toward a doorway. (They're cut off, but there's no need to stay in the middle of the street either.)

"Good, now Vriska and Terezi--"

Rose stutters -- Dave almost blinks and looks back, wondering what the fuck -- but then, in quick flickers, "You will owe me sooo much! But I guess you'd be lost without me, so why not," and then "Tssk, tssk, Vriska, not even asking the terms first, hehehe -- _I accept!_ "

He doesn't see what happens next; Karkat hisses a warning as the Rage demon flips around to stare at them and arrow straight toward them, razing the ground. Dave opens fire.

It doesn't turn back until Karkat has burst out another bush of bloody thorns around them, but the branches are so sparse now that soon the holes will be wide enough for it to fly right through. Karkat is panting, jaw set, one wing folded tight against his spine (the other one hangs and only twitches a little bit.)

"Did you just," Rose asks, and then she starts laughing quietly behind Dave's back. "Oh. _Oh._ "

She's close enough to his back that he can feel the warmth off her skin through his clothes, and it feels weird, not like when she tried to invert her alignment -- almost too warm, almost too Rose. He can't turn to check.

"Yes, well," Kankri grumbles, and tucks himself deeper in the doorway sulkily. "Now can you see a--"

"Undo it."

Dave pauses in the middle of mentally counting his bullets. "What?" he sputters. "You haven't done anything yet!"

She laughs, bright and free, and the demon whirls under a flurry of thrown bricks and stares at her from the other side of the street.

"I've done _everything_."

"What the fuck is going on! Karkat?" he complains, but Karkat looks up from where he's hunkering down at Dave's side and he's frowning in irritated bafflement.

"How should I know?" Karkat yells, even as he raises a (sluggish now) barrier of thorns.

Behind them Rose calls a name that feels like a sunny stretch of turquoise sea with not a wave, not a gust of wind for miles, and in the shadow of the ship things are rising from the deep.

"Oh! It'll be a pleasure to participate in this fascinating endeavor, yes, if you'll mind my Price--" a pause for breath, and the voice changes inflexions completely, becomes Rose's again. "--I will. Kankri, again."

Dave steals a glance over his shoulder, in time to see Terezi's hard white scales go spangled with glittering spider web. One of Rose's eyes is solid red and the other one has something seriously fucked going on with her pupil and _she is showing both effects at the same fucking time, what the holy shit even is that_.

She raises a hand and the demon flips around and charges again and Dave goes fucking blind even through his shades, even though he'd turned around again to watch the demon coming. Karkat snarls in startled pain. (Kankri's eyes were probably closed, that asshole.)

A woman's hand touches Dave's hand, angles it. "Shoot."

He does.

Something heavy lands on pavement with a meaty thud, rolls to a stop; pebbles clatter.

"That was your last bullet," Rose tells him, and pushes the grip of another gun against his hand; he holsters Burnett's without a thought to take it.

Dave grimaces. "Not done?"

_I WILL REND THE MEAT FROM YOUR SECRET XYLOPHONE AND PLAY MOTHERFUCKING SHOW TUNES UPON IT, LIGHT BITCH._

Dave grimaces some more. "Not done."

"Oh, no, _show tunes_ ," Rose says, and _giggles_. "Whatever shall I do!"

_YOUR SOUL SHALL BE SPAT OUT UPON UNHALLOWED GROUND AND RENT DOWN TO PARTICLES._

Con of the situation: Dave is still pretty glare-blind. Pro: The demon is getting pissier and pissier. Con: Rose is getting it pissier at _her_.

No idea if pro or con: did Kankri dope her up on mood uppers or what.

"Someone isn't getting enough fiber in his psychopomp diet. Have you considered switching to creative energy?"

Dave blinks; looks like he's getting back some vision but so far it's mostly blotches. "Hey, Rose, hey. Rose. Rose, hey. _Could you have maybe warned us._ "

"It would have warned him," she replies just as quietly. "Sorry I didn't unblind you, I don't have any more mirrors on me for the small stuff."

If Dave had one it's now in pieces, and he doesn't think either of their demons carries one, what with being so tragically pockets-impaired.

She takes and aims his hand again.

"Dave. Trust me?"

What the hell is that question. "'Course?"

"Shoot in..."

Space crackles, warps -- Kanaya all over. In his gun's sight, a dark shape -- Jade?! But she was --

"-- _Now_."

His trigger finger slips into place and tightens without thought. Bang. One of the two shapes falls, writhes.

"Evac the other group!" Rose yells, and space crackles again.

"I'll be right back for you!" Captain Egbert shouts across the street. (Holy shit Dave almost shot his boss. Meep. At this distance, too, and they were almost on top of each other -- what kind of witchy aim is that?)

"No need, sir!" Rose replies. "Kankri, undo."

When Dave glances at her she's still blurred, but the effects on her skin are strangely not. Aranea's dew-spangled webs fade and then she's only in Terezi's armor, Terezi's burnt-out eyes.

"I will not be able to do this many more times," Kankri warns them. He sounds winded. "I didn't expect it to be so--"

"You won't need to. Last time for me," she says just as Vriska's giant spider legs rise from her back.

Terezi's armor blurs and then stabilizes -- and then spreads onto Vriska's extra limbs.

And then just -- orange and gold and _light_.

He can't look at it straight on, it doesn't make _sense_. It refuses to be interpreted as anything his brain can wrap itself around -- only as filigrees of gold along/through/instead-of Vriska and Terezi's effects.

At his side, Karkat chokes. " _Kankri what the fuck--_ "

The Rage demon uncoils itself, lunges at the alley right through the cover fire Welch and Aguilar were laying like it doesn't even give a fuck anymore about being shot -- and space tears again. It lands with a thud in the empty alley and then there is a howl in Dave's mind of thwarted fury, trying to dig its way down his mind with brute force alone, all finesse and smooth control gone.

Rose jars Dave's elbow and grins at him, eyes way too bright for the situation. "Say, Dave."

"What?"

"Run!"

Her gun in hand, he takes off after her as she turns around and rushes down the street, Kankri hopping on her heels. "Holy fucking shit, did you get her spelldrunk or what?" Dave asks him. "We do _not_ get Rose drunk! Any kind of drunk!"

A few steps before them Rose rams her shoulder into a jammed door and disappears inside. The screech-buzzing in his brain is getting worse, like the demon is gaining on them, so Dave follows.

Office building. Out of order elevator, claustrophobic staircase, and of course that's where she goes, racing up and around the bend. Dave swears watching Karkat grit his teeth and bounce up after her. If he had a minute to bind that wing, keep it from flopping around --

It's only for a half-floor before they're following Kankri's long tail into a side-door, and where is Rose going, is this a seer thing, even though there is no person for Terezi to read the decisions off of? Does it fall into Kankri's domain instead? Doesn't seem like it should.

Twisty corridor, doors everywhere into what, no one knows, and Rose points Karkat to a door and Dave to another one and he almost says fuck no, why, and then Latula hisses, _Close!_ and he has to go.

He thinks he hears noise on the landing just as his door swings closed behind him. Kankri is hurrying before him, wings clenched tight and claws almost delicate, tail held off the wooden floor. Secretarial office, another door to a bigger boss office, and he pushes that door open a tad and scurries back to the desk Kankri is huddled under.

"Really hate hide 'n seek," he breathes as he backs up against Kankri's armored side, the tire iron cautiously held against his hip so he won't drag it on the floor.

He has to trust that Rose knows what she's doing. He has to. She wouldn't have sent him off with her demon if she didn't have a plan. Right? Right.

Something rasps against the doorjamb. Inside his head Latula has gone still and quiet and cool, like her armor is now clear ice, like she pulled him underwater and froze off the surface after them, shh, the bear is walking by.

A heartbeat, two, ten, and he lets himself breathe out.

"What's the plan," he breathes at Kankri, because if Kankri doesn't know then neither one of them knows and they are spectacularly fucked. Fucked in, like, _magical_ ways.

Kankri is wedged up in the foot well, more on his back than sitting because his wing fingers don't have enough articulations in them to bend that far. His legs are curled up like he thinks he's a cat about to murderkick a petting hand; maybe he could even lift the desk into someone's face, who knows.

"My apologies for the lack of time to present all relevant information necessary for informed consent," he starts. Dave accidentally-on-purpose elbows him under the armpit, where the armor is less big solid plates and more edges of interlocked smaller plates and exposed tendons.

"I consent, it's that or dying, keep going!"

"Conceding in the face of threats to survival is no consent at all!" he hisses back, puffing up in offense. "That is the basest of coercive--"

Dave plants a hand on Kankri's face. "I'd consent anyway out of pure curiosity, dude, move along! You got my permission."

He breathes in when Dave takes his hands off, scowling, then nods. "Ah -- Latula...?"

Dave lets her have his mouth. "Yeah, yeah, mad consent happening in here, hurry!"

Kankri hesitates, like he wants to ask more, and then shakes his head (one of his horns grazes the wood and they both stiffen, waiting, but nothing else comes.)

"Is Aradia...? No, right, she will not be free yet. Very well. Damara? Damara Megido."

Urgh. Dave tugs on their bond. He doesn't even know what the fuck she'd be saying yes to, and like hell his Witch of Time is going to cut him any slack. "I don't know if she'll -- _What do you want_. _No-good broken shit pieces._ "

Kankri's upper eyes twitch, narrow to slits. His lower eyes stay mostly calm and steady, faking boredom almost perfectly. "Passing on this hurtful and unfair descriptor--" In another room, a desk is overturned; Dave tenses up. Shit, he needs to -- Kankri's hand is on his arm, and he's still staring right through him, though his whispers speed up. "You know what I am, Damara. Do you consent?"

Dave is sure she's going to say no, being unhelpful as possible is her shtick and ain't no teaching an old dog new tricks; he sends out a ripple of thought toward Aradia's spring warmth and the turning wheel of her seasons and hopes (not much) for a response.

"You may," Damara says instead, Dave's voice coming out raspy like he's forty years old with a thirty-year-old smoking habit. "Tangle in the core of me. Thief. _Rape me hard--_ "

She's said enough to establish consent so Dave closes his mouth on her voice and clears his throat of her. He doesn't need Kankri being thrown into another tirade about consent and rape being oxymorons _now_ , there's noise in other rooms and there can't be hundreds of offices in here, the Rage demon will find Rose or Karkat eventually, fuck.

But Kankri just grits his teeth and reaches to touch Dave's shoulder where he got injured.

The crusted blood streaking his arm uncrusts, gone wet and drippy anew. Kankri brings it to his mouth. Dave inhales hard through his nose so he won't swear.

And then he

And then they

Wind hissing on scales, hitting his face, free fall. Time running out, it's too late, too late, just enough seconds to see it coming and not enough to dodge, you're fucked.

Falling. Diving. Diving at prey down below, too far, no, yes, we'll get there in time, just in time.

Oh. Wow.

Latula and Damara are coiled together around his soul but it's not, they're almost not here, or not as much, he -- it's strange, it's. He feels them but. He feels their magic, the ways they can and do twist the world along the ways their souls run, but it's.

It's _more_.

Karkat could lend his own magic to other demons, help their spells along. What Kankri did --

A massive crack of broken wood rings through the walls. Dave is rolling onto his feet in a second, racing through the other door and the big office behind. He knows this kind of building and -- _yes_. Connecting side door.

It's open. He flattens himself against the wall and glances out. He sees a long conference room, two rows of desks face to face though a lot are overturned.

Behind one of those he sees Rose, crouched low, out of sight of the other end of the room. She's watching Dave's door; she signals him to stay put, so he does.

"'S it look like there are any other stupid monkey fucks in this room? You do actually have working eyeballs and not pits of blackest despair, right? Jus' checking."

... Okay, that's Karkat's voice. (Slurring just a bit. Shit.) Coming from the left.

From the right nothing is coming back, but that's what Rose is hiding from, so.

"Is it a trap? Is it not a trap? No, you got it wrong, you dunderfuck, the trap is next room over, what a dummy, you ruined the surprise -- _you touch him and I will kill you with my teeth_."

Dave shivers as something like a laugh screeches at the very edges of Latula's defenses. He doesn't know if Karkat is talking about him or about Kankri. (Not that it matters, if Karkat's talking about him then it's purely contract-motivated.)

Rose has gone tense, eyes narrowed. Her body is still threaded in faint gold lines and Dave can't tell if they're the edges of dragon scales or spider exoskeleton.

They're still active magic, and Dave isn't sure why the Rage demon isn't feeling them, except that Karkat is down that way and he might be pouring out enough to drown them --

 _Or he play little game,_ Damara says right in his ear, and laughs. _The Seer of Trash told you. This is his target._

Dave grits his teeth.

_Cracked half out of the shell already. So easy to violate._

_Stop putting fucking sexual innuendo everyfuckingwhere,_ Dave snaps back without thought. _Dude wants to kill him, not tap his ass._

 _That **is** better! _ She snorts. _I say violate, you see impaled spread out for your little penis to spit through. So much worse to be done._

_Shut up, shut up--_

_Damara_ , Latula growls, and then chairs and tables go flying past toward Karkat and so does the Rage demon, and Dave is out of the door and it's too late already--

 _It is not,_ Damara says, and shows him how.

He's in mid-step when the blond man appears -- metal bar in hand, bloodied, _red spell light what's the summon_ \--

He's taking the next step when the blond man dies, stabbed through with red vines and then impacted straight on by the Rage demon, body thrown back over its shoulder like a rag doll. Karkat starts screaming.

Dave stumbles back, almost falls on his ass, looks down at the corpse in his arms and it's his face he sees.

" _NO!_ "

Karkat narrowly managed to dodge behind a heavy oak desk in the corner and the demon is digging its claws into it to drag it off the wall but Dave sees his face off the side, staring in -- in disbelief and --

"--Master?"

Dave lets go of the spell Damara was building.

 _Coward_ , she purrs, satisfied enough with the last dregs of life she got off the corpse. (Right. Psychopomp. How much power did she get off getting him to off himself--)

Dave has dropped himself at some point; it makes a sound like a bagful of potatoes tumbling on the wooden floor. He's stepping over himself, and it disappears. His body. Other body. From the floor. The fuck.

No, actually, he gets it.

"Dave, now!"

Dave goes. He goes and he doesn't even know exactly what the fuck happened, he'd love some time to think it through and he'd also love some time to swing and hit the demon and not have it float up to dodge, the fucking son of a bitch, but it doesn't matter if his head doesn't know.

Does it?

It doesn't.

" _Karkat, to Rose_ ," he orders as he narrowly dodges a tail swing. The Rage demon's smug face has gone slit-eyed, mouth turned down (holy fuck are those _sutures._ ) It's going to chase and kill Karkat but first it'll have to kill Dave.

Karkat scrambles out and past him and it uncoils hard to do just that. Bullet train, not two meters away. He's fucked.

He's not.

The other Dave appears already in motion, leaping off the desk, bright metal in hand. Lands feet first on its spine.

Dave jumps back, gets his arm scratched but who cares, it was fucked up already -- steps back in, tire iron raised.

He's sure it didn't need that working shoulder.

Or this collarbone. Or that grasping blade-fingered hand.

It's screeching in his mind, digging its power's claws in and Latula can't shield him quite as well with Damara pressed so close, with that weird thing Kankri did to the three of them, but he's in until the end now, he and other Dave who's still crouching on its back and pushing the last inches of Rose's broken blade between its ribs down to the pommel.

It convulses under them, forces Dave and other Dave back (the sword stays behind) but it can't fly now, it's grounded and behind it is a wall, no windows anywhere, it's trapped.

"Karkat," Dave says, and Karkat snorts and says "No shit," and erupts red thorns right through it.

Only three. Massive, though. One takes the demon's tail from the knees down off. One lops off a horn. One pierces it through the thorax at an angle.

They're not stab wounds; the flesh is _gone_ , gone in _tunnels_. Dave could see right through to the gore-drenched floor if he tried.

He takes the sword Rose hands him, steps forward. Steps onto the desk. Steps back in time.

Gets to take it down again -- to see it stabbed through again, from a slightly different angle where it's his own feet hitting its back, driving it to the floor, and his own hand on the pommel.

Gets to see himself. Previous Dave's body shimmers with slithering squareish zigzags, like a castle's battlements or the teeth of a clock's gears in bright red, and when Dave gets a flash of his own eyes over the shades the irises are almost Aradia's gears except that they're red-hot.

Karkat's breathing is loud -- it's the first thing Dave really hears, afterwards. Karkat still holds himself up, ready to spring, but his arms are shaking.

"Rose?" Dave asks. (She's still gleaming like gold in sunlight.)

"It's over," she confirms, and walks to the nearest window, breaks the glass with a well-placed elbow to wave her hand outside. Karkat takes in a shuddering breath and lets himself fall on his ass.

Dave is kneeling beside him in the next second. (Kankri watches them from the doorway, face oddly tight, leaning his weight on the doorjamb.)

"Aw, shit, shit, let me see, where's it hurt worst?"

"I don't even fucking know," Karkat grunts, and closes all his eyes at once. Dave is very sure to gentle his hand when he curves his fingers around the back of his head, guides it to rest on his shoulder.

"Your horn doesn't look cracked," he says after a few seconds. "I'm not touching your skull to make sure, we'll send you straight to a healer. I'll blackmail Jane if I need to, it'll be fine."

"I can't feel my wing," Karkat says very quietly against his skin. Dave inhales long and slow, and tries not to clench his fist onto anything that might hurt.

"It'll be fine," he tells him anyway. "I can't feel my arm either but no worries."

_That's cuz I'm mad holding on, firetruck._

_Yeah, I know. How long can you still...?_

_Well at this point it's really a choice between I let go now and you crash for a week, or I let go in five minutes and you crash for a month._

... Fuck. "You wanna lap up any drippy bit, be my guest," he tells Karkat. At this point he might well need a transfusion later anyway he slices it, so...

The Rage demon moves.

" _Holy jesus monkeysuit it's not dead!_ "

Rose limps her way to Dave, who has managed somehow to stumble upwards. His hands are empty, he dropped the tire iron, when the fuck was he stupid enough to do that shit?

"Is it immortal? What the _fuck_?"

She leans against his shoulder -- for balance and comfort more than to tease or stop him, but it stops him anyway. His heart is hammering in his throat, his temples.

"It's done," Rose says, though Dave notices that while she gives it a clinical look she doesn't move closer.

Its eyes are cracked open and blood seeps out of its sewn mouth, out of its nose. Dave can't see the sword; must have been vaporized with the rest of the several pounds of flesh Karkat carved out.

It feels like... _Latula? Is it talking?_

She harrumphs in his head. _Kinda-sorta. Feelings, mostly. Lotsa lamer bullshit._

Dave hesitates, glancing around quickly for the tire iron, or a solid enough chair or desk leg maybe. _Is, uh, is it asking us to finish it off?_

Space tears before she can answer, and Captain Egbert pops through. Roxy and another man have a hand on each of his shoulders, standing at an angle so they're covering his sides and back. It takes Dave a second, crouching on the floor, to recognize his middle brother's back.

"Yoohoo, the cavalry," Dave says, and doesn't even manage to sound deadpan; he's too exhausted.

"Status?"

He lets Rose speak to Egbert; Karkat is leaning on him and Roxy is hurrying to crouch before them, surveying the damage on both of them with an alarm that Dave is not sure is entirely... yeah no okay it's totally deserved, he is going to hurt _so much_ when it really sets in.

He doesn't like to even think about Karkat's damage, it makes him sick. He wishes opening a vein for him to drink were in any way a sane option.

"Oh shit, guys, you look so bad, wow. Either of you need a stretcher? I'll have 'em here in a jiffy--"

"I can still walk," Karkat rasps. Dave snorts.

"Yeah but you're not gonna, bud."

Karkat's eyes narrow. "Then you'd better let them evac you the same way, asshole, because I don't care -- no, shut up -- I don't care your legs aren't broken, your arm is fucked to shit and you're three drops of blood away from fainting, and going down the stairs will finish you."

 _Hell_ , Latula says, _me letting go will finish you first._ _Better give Foxxxy the heads up. Only got another two minutes in me at most._

Roxy is looking at them, sort of, but her hand is on her chest, just under her throat, and she looks distracted. Dave groans. "Oh jesusfuck if you or Dirk and Cap' get mindfucked by that asshole I am going to flip all the tables in this room." It's a lot of tables, though most of them are flipped already.

 _It's too weak now_ , Latula reassures him. _I'mma let some more through, less of a full faceplant, yeah?_

"Don't tell me your contract with Crowbar isn't full of holes," Dirk is saying. He's talking to the demon, what the fuck.

_AS YOU SO COMMAND, MY PRINCE. I WILL KILL HIM RIGHT THE FUCK NOW._

It laughs. Dave twitches, Roxy winces, Karkat growls. Cap's glow intensifies, like he's about to teleport the lot of them out of range. Dirk just sighs.

"Kurloz. Stop being a bag of dicks. No demon your level wants to die."

Oh fuck no, he wants to save it. No. Nonononononono. Demons are amoral and Dave himself is using Damara, who would send him down the way Crowbar went if he gave her the slightest chance, but still, _fuck_ no. "I'm objecting the fuck out of this," he says out loud, but no one seems to be listening.

_IF YOU SAY SO, MY PRINCE, IT MUST BE THE FULL-ON TRUTH._

Dirk lets the snark slide off, eyebrows knitted in his classical Fix-It Man face, the face where 'should we' is not even a question anymore, we're already onto 'how'. Shit. "Roxy, come on, we need to start tracing the disincarnating seal we used for Erisol -- ah, if you'll permit, sir."

Dave can't see Captain Egbert's face; he's standing with his back to them, between them and the demon.

"I am not convinced this is the best place for the attempt," Egbert says, measured and stern, skin still glowing white.

"He'll die before we can move him," Dirk shoots back, and then makes himself add a "Sir" that Dave is sure makes him somehow _not_ sound like he's trying to boss his boss around.

" _Detective_." Yyyyep, the sirring totally worked. Egbert hasn't gone into stern mode at _all_. "There has been a lot of activity with the hell gate today and the ether will be problematic enough to--"

The sky rips.

Dave thinks it's the sky. Maybe just reality.

Maybe they're in the hell gate area now, maybe it spread again, this is it. This is when he turns inside out and his soul is rent in two, this is when he can't feel time anymore and eternities pass within each second, both at once, all at once.

Damara is crooning.

He clings to her, clings to their bond. Latula screeches -- she's in pain -- she's blind and lost and she's tied to him with Kankri's bonds and can't escape and he -- _what's happening_.

It's over in a flash, it's never over, it's over three times in a row and then Dave blinks open eyes he thought he had stopped having and he's staring at the floor and the puddle of vomit he just left on it.

Oh.

Dirk is swearing (never swears) and Kurloz is dead (dead with a laugh, torn apart with a sandpaper purr) (killed by -- by --) and Karkat trembles endlessly against his side (is time still wrong, time is never wrong) and Rose's tush is on the floor and "Kankri!" Latula is saying from his mouth, "Kankri, let go _now_ , I can't--"

Welp. Checkout time. She warned you, bro.


	18. Chapter 18

He's been listening to the intermittent clicketyclick for hours, he thinks, before it makes him think about maybe waking up all the way.

Doesn't want to, but the door opened some time ago (twelve minutes, thirty to fifty seconds) and he thinks there's someone else in the room? Maybe. Feels like someone's staring at him.

Maybe Karkat is hungry. Mmh. Maybe he could climb up on this (weird) bed and do his thing (mnuh dun wanna, but should) and then cuddle up and Dave wouldn't have to wake up all the way and it'd be so nice and good and warm.

"So," says a baritone voice, veiled and quiet.

The clicketyclick stops. (Keyboard? Hnm.) "What." (Oh, Karkat. Yeah. That's the noise. Keyboard and claws.)

The other voice is Bro of course, who else could it be when he's nice, safe and floaty (and not home.)

"How's the sex?"

Dave did not need his identity confirmed via _choice of fucking topic_. Oh no. Nope, ain't gonna wake up now. Nothing can make him.

"Uh. Nutritious?"

Bro groans quietly. "Oh kid, no. What's the issue there, not enough passion? Need kinkier positions? Does he, like, not manage to find your clitoris?"

Dave gives in to the fact that he is indeed awake, groans out loud, and bats a hand (the one that will move) at his own face to de-gum his eyes, which are crusted with shit to hell and back. "You tryin' t' kill me in full, you bast--"

He opens his eyes in time to see Lil Cal topple in slow motion over his face.

" _EYAGH_."

A clawed hand snatches the puppet away as he flails one-handed, holds it away from him; Karkat gets in his face instead. Way better. Yay for blood breath. Blood breath _forever_.

"Are you _finally_ awake, you lazy fucking slacker?"

"I wanna go back to sleep," Dave groans, but he tilts his head to watch Bro as he gets up from his chair and plucks Cal out of Karkat's hand. Karkat gives Bro a wary side look, but declines to dig his claws in and refuse to let the puppet go.

There are bandages around Karkat's torso. Dave's brow knits.

"Huh. 're you still hurt?" He's too sleepy to get pissed off easily, but if he's been asleep for (six days, three to eleven hours, it's annoying to be so vague) a while and no one got around to using some fucking healing magic on his demon Dave is going to make the effort.

Karkat blinks, then turns his shoulder away, tush perched on the side of Dave's mattress, his little tail facing him. His broken wing is folded tight against his spine, kept in place by the bandages. No more leaking or exposed insides, but the shell where there were cracks looks odd, whiteish instead of pure gray and not shiny-smooth at all. Kinda... puffy.

"They had to cut off some of the edges so Jane could make it regrow properly," Karkat says fake-casually, "but now it needs to harden and that's more of a Time thing."

Dave blinks, opens his mouth, closes it. Yeah, uh, Aradia freezes things and Damara decays them, and he hasn't got any Sylph at hand, not even a Class Three one.

And whatever Kankri did (so right, _so_ right) that wouldn't work for healing either. (He doesn't even know if he can take anyone else along.)

Also he's exhausted as all fucks but who cares.

A wet washcloth slaps him in the face, and he splutters quietly. Oh right, Bro. He grabs it and wipes his face and eyes clean wearily, then lobs the cloth back at him and feels around for his shades.

His injured arm is strapped to his chest. Huh.

"Janey agreed with me that healing your arm all the way was not appropriate use of resources," Bro tells him calmly, and props his ass on the other bed, which has mussed covers and a laptop and his cell phone on it. He wonders if Bro or Karkat slept on it.

Huh. Wait. "--Oh, you assholes. Tryin' to keep me out of commission."

Bro's face and voice don't change at all, but Dave still winces a little. "Trying to keep you out of commission long enough for you to recuperate, yeah, guilty as charged."

"Okay, fine. Yeah. Okay." He totally earned a vacation anyways. (In three days he won't want it anymore but that doesn't mean right now he doesn't feel it. Fuck, sleepy.)

Bro relents some, pats Cal's back; the puppet is slung on his shoulder like a gassy baby. "She made sure it'd all heal right and you wouldn't be left with a fucked up socket that keeps popping the hell out, or nerve damage. Send her a thank-you note."

Dave grumbles and tilts his head back into his pillow. "Yeah, yeah."

A few seconds of quiet.

"How's Rose 'n everyone?" he reminds himself to ask, eyes closed.

"Rosie got out yesterday morning. Burnett three days ago. You're the last one in here."

Figures.

So tired. He just woke up. What the shit.

"Karkat -- they feed you?"

"Yeah," Karkat replies, looking down at him with a weird look on his face. "I regularly get delightful hospital meals, smuggled chocolates, and transfusion packs, which are disgusting and not a ton of help seeing how they're the farthest from fresh off the donor, but I'll live a little while longer. If you could tell your genetic relation to clear out we could get a start on fixing that looming starvation problem though."

Dave stares. Dave pinches his lips. Dave tilts his shades down so he can glower over the rim of them.

"Did you just. No."

"Hint that I should clear out so you guys can engage in hospital hanky panky?" Bro drawls, hands in his pockets and not going anywhere.

"I didn't hint, asswad, that was a suggestion I wrongly assumed you had enough basic intelligence to understand clearly."

Dave goes _sprfhl_ in his hand, or something equivalent. He's pretty sure Bro can tell it was trying to be a laugh. Welp. "I, uh." Oh, fuck it. He lets himself smile. He's got the _loopy from six days' sleep!_ excuse. "Don't think my Excalibur is up for being pulled out of the rock today. Like... nope. Sorry, man, king you another day."

"That's too bad," Bro says over Karkat's affronted glare, "would have been hilarious to see what else you break trying to play trampoline on a twin bed with wheels."

"I'm sure the wheels are locked," Dave replies, which is a really subpar comeback and he perhaps shouldn't have tried. "... But yeah okay it's still a super bad idea, sorry Karkat."

"Like you need to move to get a blowjob," he grumbles. Dave closes his eyes really tight behind his shades.

Bro makes a sound that almost sounds like a laugh but surely cannot be one. "Protip, kid... Don't talk about sex with someone around someone's parental units. Weird human taboo."

Karkat stares at him. " _You_ talk about sex with him. You _just did_ talk about sex."

"No, we talk _around_ sex, because we're douchebags. We _joke_ about sex. We give each other a hard time. Candid visuals of actual happenstances not desired."

Grumpy pout. Karkat crosses his arms. (He's oddly cautious toward the end of the movement, like it tugs on the root of his wing perhaps.) "Your taboos are stupid and you're stupid for having them, but fine. Get out so we can talk about it, then."

Dave almost wants to let it happen at this point. Only if he doesn't bring it up now they'll slide right back into pretending there's no demon elephant in the room. Demon puppet, same thing. Nope, nothing to talk about. He interrupts Bro mid-undoubtedly hilarious denial of Karkat's wish that he vacate the area.

"Bro. Change of topic."

"Hmm?"

"'bout Cal."

Bro goes "Hmm?" again, though this time it's lower, more reserved.

"What the _fuck_ was that warning about. With Mituna."

Bro's head tilts, like he's staring at the floor, arms still loosely crossed. Cal is sitting on his shoulder, an arm looped around his hat, mouth hanging open in what Dave is trying not to read as a manic grin. Before Dave blinked the puppet was flopped belly-down across his shoulder.

"Yeah. That."

Dave exhales slowly. Bro won't be pretending he has no clue what the fuck Dave is on about. Good.

Karkat's eyes have gone narrow, spines rising just a little bit.

"Yeah, I'm a bit cross with him about that, too," Bro says, all quiet, and throws the puppet on his shoulder a sidelong look. "No, I don't care he'll be fine eventually, Cal, you used me, that's not on."

"I should probably find it creepier that you're talking to your puppet, but I talk with the voices in my head all the time." Shades down, Dave meets his father figure's eyes straight on, adult cop to adult family member who damn well hid illegal shit from him right under his fucking nose. "So. Karkat, you hearing him?"

"No," Karkat grunts. "But he's Time, just get his Name and summon."

Dave blinks, and Cal's head has flopped forward, hanging listlessly. "Oh, like fuck you are sorry, don't you run away from the conversation."

"His Name is Calloz," Bro says calmly. "But as you can see that'll help you exactly jack shit."

Dave stares. No echo of any soul name at all. It was just noise. The hell? Dave doesn't care that he's exhausted, Karkat says Cal is Time too, Dave should grasp that shit easy. Instead it's like Bro is talking about... an empty toy. A piece of wood.

Bro taps the back of a knuckle against a dangling cloth leg, oddly gently. "He's bound in here, real tight. Weirdass spell shit. A pure fluke, really."

"Huh? What'd you... what?"

Bro hikes up a shoulder. "Long story short when I was a stupid little shit who thought he knew more than he did I tried my first summoning without bothering to ask for supervision, and if your bio dad hadn't come home early I'd have made for a nice demon gourmet meal." He knocks a knuckle against Cal's side. Cal's jaw is still hanging like he's laughing, and Dave could _swear_ he's staring straight at him.

"Well uh. It's nice to know Rose gets it from somewhere," Dave managed to answer. Though the thing with Rose is, she _succeeded_. Dave isn't sure he should tell her that little tale of young geniuses and hubris, she'd be insufferable.

Bro snorts quietly. "Pf. I was totally more precocious. Beat her by about a year, even. Anyway, my Bro and I were flying blind for a lot of the spellcasting so neither of us were entirely sure what we did, but one result is that nothing's seeping out. No external spells for this bad boy."

"I don't care about the fucking origin story," Karkat snaps, irritated, wings trying to spread. (The second he feels the bandages holding one down, he refolds the other one with a quick flinch.) "What did he do _last week_?"

"Ensured his own conception, if I get him right."

Dave pushes himself a little farther up on his pillows and stares. "... What."

"Can't get it clearer than that, kiddo. He doesn't speak in words. Gets confusing." Bro... sighs, rakes a hand through his hair, dislodging his cap, which isn't something Dave has ever seen much of. "He just... time travel, yeah? Was born during that clusterfuck last week, went back in time to where he wouldn't get munched, I summoned him. That's the sense I'm getting, at least."

Dave blinks slowly. Okay. Time travel. Sure. Why not.

He did time-travel himself barely six days ago, after all. Granted, he only went back a minute, but.

What the fuck.

Karkat makes a thoughtful noise. "So in our time something would have eaten him. I wouldn't have thought there'd be another Prince of Time in the area right now, Dave would have them on his roster, wouldn't you?"

"Shit yeah, I'd hit that so fast." Dave blinks, trying to give his brain a little jolt. He feels so slow, it's annoying. "Huh. Cal-loz. That Prince of Rage was _Kur-_ loz. And it died there. ... How the fuck does demon conception work? Is it like a phoenix thing, reborn from the ashes?"

Karkat stares back, bland-faced, mouth pointedly closed.

"Aw, come on."

"It's not anywhere close to being only my secret to tell, so just guess how much power you'd have to pour into it before I spill."

"A lot?" Dave tries. Karkat keeps staring. "... Too much?"

"Getting closer. Vaguely." He rolls his eyes, turns away to stare Bro down again. "Okay so it ensured its own existence, loop's closed, and the sweaty ballsack over here will survive. What's the issue?"

Dave blinks. "What, you're fine with it? We could have died."

"His actions make perfect sense and I'd do the same if I were him." He shrugs. "Doesn't mean I don't want to eat him for almost managing to get you dead, but that's fair."

... Right. Demons.

"Yeah," Bro replies, slow and not amused, "only he was only sure Dave would live until his conception. Coulda died right after that, and he let me think what we were doing by sending that warning was averting it, instead of making sure Dave wouldn't run too early."

Karkat's back is mostly to him, but Dave is pretty sure he's staring at his Bro, hard and not especially friendly. "Did you ask him? In details? No caveat?"

Bro's voice goes... tense, almost. Stealth-angry. "We don't work like that."

"He's a demon. You're his summoner -- that dickmongler's just your fake offspring. You do work like that."

Welp. Bro doesn't answer, though the muscles of his jaw bulge in not-so-good ways.

"Would you do that too?" Dave asks, a bit stupidly because Karkat basically just told him that yes he would. "Sacrifice him offhand like that?"

Karkat snorts, disdainful, though his head is bowed, turned away from Dave. "Your... Bro? If he somehow fell in the cracks of the three thousand ways you've forbidden me to risk other people, why not."

Huh. "You'd just, like. Not say anything. And use it."

"If it meant you and I lived?" Karkat replies with a sneer, glaring down at him.

His little eyes are all squinched and trying to slide away. Dave cracks a smile. "That the truth? The whole truth, nothing but the truth?"

Grumble. "I might move a little more of my ass for Rose, but it's different, I'm--"

Hrrm. Dave's eyebrows rise. "You're?" Interesting. He expected more of a 'she's.'

"...Nothing."

"Aw, come on. Is it about how she's got your Blood bro, or about that mad tangly action around the soul bits that Latula was talking about? Like, how if Rose flips alignments she'd take me along for the ride?"

Karkat crosses his arms, sets his chin to mulish, but before he can sneer back that he's not answering -- Dave knows _that_ expression by now -- Bro twitches up from his perch, Cal tucked under his arm.

"Okay, time for me to go. Not that your little domestic spats aren't cute but I'm gonna miss my show."

Dave blinks behind his shades. Abrupt. It does seem he's beating himself up more than enough about the Cal thing; Dave doesn't want to press it right now. "--Yeah, okay. You coming back tomorrow?"

"Maybe. Who the fuck knows. I'll catch you a doctor and tell them to drop by."

He comes back between the two beds for a quick fistbump, and then he's gone. Dave blinks some, swallows a surprise yawn.

"Finally," Karkat grumbles, and gets up to go fuss at the other bed's blankets, set them just right for a nest. It's the bed between Dave and the door, crazy exposed.

"Where'd the laptop come from?"

"Roxy."

Dave's been under for six days. Okay, Karkat needed a distraction or he'd only make a nuisance of himself to the staff and patients! But. Considering the last time.

"... Did she install a net nanny."

"Next time I blow you I'm going to bite down."

"Hot."

Karkat type-types away for another minute, perched on the edge of the other bed. Dave watches idly, eyes mostly closed. His brain is on half-speed.

So many questions to ask, but... mnh.

He cracks an eye open when his bed dips again, opens the other one to watch Karkat climb on, not sure where to put his knees, hovering over Dave with one hand coming down to brace on his pillow, making Dave's head roll a bit.

"Really wasn' kiddin' that I can't feed you now," he says, kind of sorry.

Karkat hits him lightly in the chest with the corner of Dave's own smartphone, held tight in a clawed hand. "Shut up, moron."

He finds a way to wedge himself in against Dave's side, and then he starts fiddling away with Dave's phone right under Dave's own nose. The screen is at an angle, too, he can't even read it. Pure cruelty.

"Who're you talkin' to...?"

Karkat tilts the screen with a put-upon huff. Dave squints.

**@cruorGuardian and ey said im def a knight for sure!! :D**

**@LoLaLaLa GOOD. ALL OTHER CLASSES SUCK GOAT DICK AND SMELL ACCORDINGLY. I MIGHT NOT HAVE TO KILL YOU AT THE FIRST GIGGLE AFTER ALL.**

**@cruorGuardian lolol. no idea what type tho apart from not doom or rage**

**@LoLaLaLa TRY SUMMONING FOR LIFE FIRST. SLIGHTLY LESS OF A CHANCE THEY'LL SLAUGHTER YOU OUT OF HAND, STATISTICALLY SPEAKING.**

**@cruorGuardian hahaha wow knight of life itd be badass**

**@cruorGuardian guardian, u there?? im waiting 2 be told how blood is way badasser here**

**@cruorGuardian guaaaaardiaaaaaaaaaaann ;^; T^T , >.<,**

**@LoLaLaLa THE TURDFACE LIVES. HUZZAH.**

**@cruorGuardian aww do u gtg?**

Karkat gives Dave a challenging look, and types, at an angle that must not be comfortable for his wrist, **NO, FUCK HIM, I WAITED ON HIS ASS, HE CAN WAIT ON MINE.**

@ **cruorGuardian yay!!**

Then Karkat nudges his head hard into the hollow of Dave's shoulder to reshape it into a proper pillow (ow, horn), props the phone in the crook of Dave's cast-locked elbow like Dave's a convenient piece of furniture, and starts typing with a single, oddly practiced thumb. Dave can't read the screen anymore, but he doesn't mind; his eyes were starting to feel the strain.

"She know you're a demon?" he asks, eyes closing despite his best attempt.

"No duh, she's one of your pet demon followers, where do you think she found me."

"Mkay, s' good."

He can see a tiny bit of Karkat's injured skull when he cracks his eyes open but it's all covered by his hair. Should check later how well they fixed it. Yeah. From this angle the horn doesn't look chipped but the injury was at the base, he thinks, maybe not even quite to the horn itself, he can't remember. There was blood.

"...cuddly. Mm."

Karkat cricket-snorts without even looking at him. Weirdest noise ever. "I'm not _cuddly_. I fucking hate how you feel after a blood transfusion, it messes with -- it's annoying."

"Mm?"

"Also you're warm and the room isn't and somehow no one thought to get me clothes."

"Mnh."

"Yeah."

"To'lly cuddlin'."

"Shut up and sleep or I will smother you into unconsciousness," Karkat growls, hard chest rattling against his side.

You're already doing that, Dave says, or thinks he says, or thinks about saying maybe, or... did he say it?

He thinks he hears the door open, some lady Karkat calls Doctor, but the echoes swallow her voice and he sinks away.

\--

He dreams of flying sea serpents and Rose wearing his shades and he's tied up, can't go to her, oh no, wait, the ropes at his knees are a skirt, yeah, that makes more sense. He trips and drowns in dust, hot and tickly-dry in his nose, he can't get up.

Cricket noises like an earthquake rumble his world around and then a gauntleted hand reaches for him and someone says all soft and gentle, _oh, what did you do to yourself now._

He wakes himself halfway trying to figure out if that was Karkat or Kankri, and then dives right back into a dream of using Latula as a flying skateboard because he's late for school.

\----

SERIAL TERROR-KILLER SLAIN, goes a headline. POLICE CUT DEMON PUPPEETER'S STRINGS, says another. ORGANIZED CRIME SUMMONER SOUL'S DEVOURED IN ASSAULT AGAINST POLICE FORCES! Most of the news articles Dave pulls up on the laptop are rehashes of the same quick summary, competing for the most provoking or incriminating rewording.

At least there's no video of this clusterfuck. Dave would be really fucking embarrassed.

"I'm going to slaughter Egbert the Lesser," Karkat mutters from his seat on the other bed. Dave would wonder how his demon guessed what he was looking at, but really his mouth has been quirking up every time he sees that one profile picture the articles keep using for Karkat. It's pavlovian at this point, gonna have to train himself out of it or his rep will be destroyed.

"But it was such a fetching bedsheet," he replies, expression as flat as possible. It's the picture he and John used for the notice in his building, with the blue cloth Karkat's spines tore into pieces the second they were done taking it. "A work of art. Its loss haunts me to this day. Let me at least mourn, man, have you no pity."

"Nope," Karkat says. "I traded it for teeth with better shredding power and two working middle fingers." He briefly slows down on the phone in order to properly demonstrate the left one.

Dave is not smiling because Karkat is not joking along looking barely put-upon, okay that's a lie they are totally doing that.

There have been no more surprise cuddles, but then again Dave hasn't needed another transfusion. Still, it's been nice, dozing and waking and seeing Karkat first thing every time, watching back with all his eyes narrowed like he's still having serious doubts about Dave's continued ability not to take a wrong turn before Wake Up station and crash in Keel Over country.

"Hey, Karkat," he starts without even knowing how he'll finish (he'll wing it, he's good at that.)

But Karkat blinks and his head swivels toward the door. A second later said door opens with what would have been a bang if Jade hadn't realized at the last second that making so much noise in a hospital isn't a great plan and snatched it back before it hits the wall.

"Hi!"

She stalk-bounces in, ponytail swinging behind her. She's in civvies -- jeans skirt, loose T-shirt, sleeveless jacket -- and so is Rose, in a knitted sweater and purple sneakers with ridiculous laces. Watching them he can't decide what temperature it must be outside.

"Awake, I see," Rose says as she walks in. Kankri is on her heels, and he flicks the door closed with calculated precision with the tip of his tail as the girls step around Karkat's bed. Dave snorts quietly when Karkat harrumphs at the display and his own tiny tail flicks down to press against his ass cheeks. (Not that Dave's eyes are attracted to that kind of motion by reflex, nope.)

"You're finally awake! You jerk." Jade steps between the beds to punch him in the shoulder, and then she punches Karkat's.

"Ow," Dave says obediently. (He's glad his bad shoulder is on the other side of her, he's not sure she would have hesitated.)

"What the hell, shitface?"

"I asked you to tell Dave to call me, and you didn't."

He grumbles, back spines flexing. "I'm not your answering machine, you could have called him yourself."

"I _did_."

Karkat gives her a bland look, looks down at the phone in his hands. "Oh, will you look at that, the ringer is turned off. Maybe because it would have _woken him up_ and maybe because _doctors asked me to turn it off_ so as not to _disturb the other patients_. No, Detective Harley gets what she wants when she wants it and fuck anyone not the police."

They keep bickering about vibrate mode and who knows what else. Rose butts Jade aside with her ... well, butt, and leans down to hug Dave. He returns it, for a second or three, and then it gets uncool.

"Hey sis. Hey Kanks. Harley, stop flirting with Vantas, it's mad flustering at this range, how shameless."

They both splutter.

"What the hell, I wasn't--" "What the fuck, she wasn't--"

"No, Dave is right," Rose says with a ponderous nod. "That was a fine display of pigtail pulling."

If it pinged him as flirting even a little bit he might actually get pouty or mildly emo, but from where Dave is sitting it looks like not only Karkat isn't scared of her anymore, but that they might even be becoming, like, _friends_ or something, which is crazy amounts of adorable. Squabblefriends, at least. Arguebuddies. Wranglepals. Something suitably Egbertian like that.

"I feel I should mention I gave Karkat permission to inflict mild harm, last week," Dave says, "and since I'm pretty sure if I tried to magic up my little toe right now the whole hospital would take turns beating me unconscious, that means I haven't taken it back yet."

Jade blinks a little, though she doesn't look afraid. Karkat flinches.

"Oh, uh. You... Remembered that. Damn."

Dave arches a pointed eyebrow his way. "How many calls'd you filter, dude?"

Karkat squirms a tiny little bit. "... Didn't keep count. You were asleep. But I answered the one from your boss, he should drop by for a debriefing pretty soon."

Dave groans. "Thanks for the heads up. And I'm fine now so next time stop texting for a minute and pass it to me, yeah? You really need your own phone, Jesus."

"Oh, you are so not fine," Jade says, lips pursed. Rose gives it her own little disdainful sniff of agreement.

"Well maybe but at least I can stay awake now," Dave replies. Then he yawns. Welp.

He watches the girls seat themselves -- Jade on Karkat's bed, Rose on a chair by the foot of Dave's bed, so he only sees her from the shoulders up. Kankri is looking at the chair available with distaste. Yeah, the metal arms and the absence of hole in the back would not accommodate his sails or butt ornament much.

"You can sit on Karkat's bed too," Dave suggests.

Karkat growls quietly, and leans forward behind Jade's back to haul back all the things he squirreled away in the sheets, amongst which were the laptop, three chocolate bars, Dave's compote from lunch, his badge-and-armband that he took off earlier because he was trying to break off that annoying metal ring, and a packet of blood that really should be in a fridge if Karkat isn't eating it right now.

"I see now, you are actually a squirrel demon. Here I assumed insectoido-crustacean."

Karkat flicks Rose the bird. Kankri purses his lips with grim distaste and drags a chair in to use as a stepladder; when it wobbles under him Jade has to brace it with her foot before he will start climbing again. Dave can't help but compare this with Karkat forcing himself up on his back legs and hopping the rest of the way up. Clumsy and heavy as Kankri is, he'd probably fall down and drag the blankets off with him, he supposes.

It's mostly a matter of confidence and coordination, though. He's sure Karkat in that body would have no trouble moving around.

"Really should get you to a gym," he comments.

"I feel you are implying that the lack of accommodations for my obvious disabilities means I should be the one to fix myself to meet unfair ableness -- hss -- standards," Kankri replies, though he's distracted from his brewing tirade by having to figure out how to turn and sit without walloping Jade in the face with a wing blade or sitting on his own tail -- considering it's bladed too, one stabbing implement for each shell segment, it would probably hurt.

"I feel he's implying you're a fucking liability, and Rose kicks ass just fine so don't pretend it's a natural trait of seers to be unable to figure out their left dick from their right." Karkat kicks Kankri in the hip; Kankri gasps and grabs for the foot of the bed. Jade slaps Karkat's knee, over the spur.

"Karkat, don't be a dick. Rose was trained from childhood, and Kankri hasn't been embodied a month."

"Exactly so, thank you, Detective. I also feel that referring to hypothetical genitals of mine is absurd and crude and wholly unnecessary."

"Oh my Level Seven, shut the fuck up before you vomit up the strap-on up your ass, I know the pressure is intense up there but no one wants to buy ex-dildo diamonds, alright? Sorry to disappoint, wait, no, I'm not."

Dave's face stays perfectly straight, but his mouth betrays him with a _pfffrtht_. He pinches his lips and pretends Rose isn't smirking at him.

"You swear on Level Sevens now, Karkat?"

"Why not, they're about as credible and provable as your weird concepts of godhood."

Bright grin. "Oh, so Level Sixes are more provable than that?"

Dave's demon narrows his eyes warningly at Dave's sister. Dave feels absolutely zero need to get in between that.

"So, pardner, how goes work?"

Jade snorts a little at him, but she leans in anyway. "It goes... not very? I've been out on a couple things with John since Rose was out, but she'll be back soon so I'm back to being shuffled between people and sitting on my butt doing paperwork. Even more paperwork than usual! You owe me _so many beers_."

Dave allows himself a tiny smile. "Sure thing, pardner." Drunk Jade is usually hilarious, so he might even spring for harder stuff. "As soon as we manage to sync up our hospital stays."

She grins. "So, never?"

"Heh." He looks her over. "Still having those, you know, exhaustion issues?"

"Nah, I'm fine. What with _not being put on call for a week because my partner's in the hospital_." She mock-glares, mouth pursed, then relents, goes back to easy sparkly-eyed friendliness. "How long do you have left, anyway?"

Rose and Karkat and Kankri stop snarking at each other about Dave doesn't even know what to listen. Dave shrugs. (With one shoulder, because the other one is going to stay in its sling at least another week.)

"Hey, it was my turn to be benched, you're not gonna begrudge me that, are you?"

She throws one of Karkat's chocolate bars at his head and beans him in the forehead. Karkat goes "Hey!" and looks indignant, so of course Dave tucks it in the crook of his elbow à la nope mine now.

"Dunno, another couple days here because apparently there's a chance I'd swoon alone in my apartment and not be found until Karkat had already eaten half of my corpse, and I've got another week of--"

"If you keeled over, my meat costume would be putrefying right beside yours, you shit-slurping dickmongler."

\-- right.

"That... was a joke."

Long hard look.

"Okay not a very good one, my bad, they can't all be winners."

"None of them have been winners so far, but what do I know."

Dave grumbles. Rose and Jade are smirking, the witches. "Okay fine, they'll find us by the stink of putrefaction, you happy? Anyway, since Jane gave it a head start I'll just get another week of sling for the shoulder, and then I should be back at work on light duty for another month as I do rehab. Maybe two months."

Unless he can talk her or Jade into speeding it up a bit more, but he knows better than to ask right now, when Jade is likely to nix it for cause of Dave not having learned his lesson. You'd think he gets hurt on the job deliberately! Or takes big risks just because he doesn't care if he... gets hurt yeah okay there might be a smidgen of truth in there. Maybe. Rose surely beat him over the head with it enough, but like she can talk, she just hides it better.

He moves around a bit on his pillows; he can't feel his ass anymore. Everyone but Karkat is politely watching him, like that's somehow interesting, or maybe like they're expecting him to pull a dove out of his butt crack and break into song. Dave clears his throat. "So... What's going on with the case?"

Rose shrugs, a bit stiffer than usual. "I'm still on sick leave. Jade, please?"

"Well, um." Jade swings her leg as she thinks. "Everyone and their grandmother knows Crowbar didn't act alone, _but_. So far there's pretty much no way to prove he had the approval or support of anyone else in the Felt." Her shoulders slump. "So we've taken away their demon and stopped them terrorizing the other gangs, but that's it. Back to the status quo."

"Aw, hell." Dave groans, bumps his head against the headboard in frustration, once and then twice. "I mean okay we've stopped them killing and fucking up more dudes, that's something, but we've lost how many liters of blood collectively and we still don't have them? What's it going to take!"

"A question we must all ponder," Rose replies with mock gravitas. Dave chucks the chocolate bar at her. (He misses.)

"What about Crowbar? I mean, he was in pretty bad shape last I saw him but the news hasn't said he's dead yet..."

"Vegetative state," Jade informs him with a heavy sigh.

"Of fucking course." Is he surprised? Nope. Kurloz would have chomped through the poor asshole pretty hardcore once it was off the leash. "Do they know if he's got a chance of waking up?"

"He will not," Kankri says simply. Dave blinks.

"Uh. Seer thing?"

"Indeed," Kankri replies, oddly casual. "I was allowed to observe the body through a window. I must say -- and warning you for discussion of potentially upsetting metaphysical injuries -- the damage to his soul is remarkably extensive. If I may offer a metaphor, it resembles lace in that it now presents much more hole than cloth. Sadly, the holes are not in a harmonious pattern that might support the stability of his soul until it grows back, and they will definitely not support sentience or coherent memory." A shrug, hands opened face up on his knees. "His life force will run out sometime in the next two days in any case."

As he speaks, Rose is nodding along, swishing the chocolate bar in her hand absently.

Karkat flips onto hands and knees without warning, bounces over Kankri's trailing tail, and leans out of the bed to snatch it out of her hand. Dave expects him to pitch right off the bed, but he slaps his hand on the wall by Rose's shoulder and shoves himself back.

Dave claps, sort of, slapping his free fingers against the back of his immobilized hand.

"Go fuck yourself with your cast," Karkat replies with grim satisfaction, "and the next person who touches my food will be eating wrappers through the wrong hole."

He drops himself ass first back into his hollow against the headboard.

"What I'm really wondering about is what the fuck that Kurloz asshole thought it was doing."

"Detective Strider -- ah, the other one -- has indicated that Kurloz preferred the pronoun 'he'," Kankri says. Karkat kicks his tail a bit.

"No, that's just what he used on Kurloz, how do you know it was what Kurloz wanted, huh? Considering what an asshole this one is, who's to say the other one wouldn't misgender it deliberately, have you even thought of that?"

"Karkat, you are stereotyping human beings' behavior and biases based on their genetic relationships, that is quite the assumption. And may I request that you do not use physical means to underline your points? I assure you, words are enough."

"You can request it, doesn't mean I'll change it." He reclines on his pillow, crosses his arms with deliberate firmness. "You're discriminating against my being a more physical speaker than you are and silencing part of my natural means of communication. For shame, Kankri, I can't believe you'd oppress me so -- yeah, shut up, natural in this body so not very natural but you get what I fucking mean."

"I do believe the interjection 'shut up' does mean you just did attempt to silence me, Karkat, and much more blatantly than--"

"Aha, you _do_ admit it!"

"I admit to _nothing_ ," Kankri retorts with a bit of grumpiness, "and I am starting to feel that you are not open to good faith discourse at this point in time."

"What was your first clue?"

Dave would let them bicker all afternoon -- better than TV -- but Jade coughs into her fist. "Karkat, stop needling Kankri, Kankri stop taking Karkat seriously when he's being bratty, you're just handing him more fuel."

"You're not my Master," Karkat retorts. Rose goes "You're not my mom!" under her breath.

"Seriously, sis, you should leave Kankri here, none of us will be bored."

" _I will attempt to fly from the top of the hospital_ ," Karkat hisses, glaring at him malevolently. "I will land _head fucking first_ on the pavement and explode in a gory mess of exoskeleton chunks and attached meat. The blood and piss puddle will be _glorious_."

"Are you honestly threatening suicide over my presence now?" Kankri says with a sigh. "This is hardly believable of you."

"True, I'd be more likely to start with murder!"

"That ain't believable either," Dave says. Karkat flips around to glower at him, incensed. Dave shrugs. "Sorry, you're a marshmallow. A marshmallow on fire, but totally a marshmallow."

"You _still_ haven't rescinded my permission to inflict mild harm," Karkat reminds him, venomous.

Dave quirks him a little smile. Karkat growls.

"... Shut up. Anyway, Kurloz, what was he doin -- _it_ , what was _it_ doing."

"C'mon, Karkat. At this point it's just bad faith," Dave says wisely, and gets glared at some more. Kankri is looking piously smug.

"Long story short," Jade says, trying not to smile, "we have no idea."

"That isn't quite true," Rose amends. "We know thanks to Kankri that his prime objective was to target him as well as Karkat. That's corroborated by the fact that none of the other patrols were engaged directly but were merely led on merry chases by weaker demons, after which they immediately disappeared. What we don't know is why."

"You certain that offing the two of you was his first objective?" Dave asks Kankri.

Kankri stares back, sober, uncharacteristically quiet, hands on his knees. He nods.

"You got any idea why?"

"Yes," Kankri says, and nothing else. Dave's eyes narrow; he doesn't even need the way Karkat stiffens and frowns at his demon-twin to confirm. In her chair Rose looks satisfied and frustrated at once.

"But you can't share."

"No." A short, thoughtful pause. "My apologies."

Dave snorts a bit. "You're not sorry, you're being polite."

"And what's wrong with being polite, if I may inquire?" Kankri asks pointedly.

Dave waves it off. He looks at his partner, at his sister. They've obviously figured it out already, but he says it anyway. "Funny how Kankri can't talk about his previous employer, and can't talk about how he met the leader of the Midnight Crew, and how he now can't talk about a demon who worked for the Felt."

"It _is_ a fascinating series of completely coincidental events," Rose says, stroking a beard she does not actually have. Okay just her chin, but when they were kids Dave once got her a wizard beard as a joke and she kept it on for a week and now the gesture is... well.

"Mmh."

"So how many Seer summoners are there in the Felt?" Jade asks Kankri, head tilted in friendly curiosity. "Because two Blood guys in the same city, that'd be a bit much."

Kankri stares at her for a second before he smiles, a faint, reluctantly amused thing. "I'm afraid I couldn't say."

Jade makes her 'ooh you will NOT thwart me for long' face, all pursed mouth and narrowed eyes and shoulders squared in determination. "So that angle is covered too, isn't it. Thorough."

Rose waves it off, hand all elegant. "Oh, the Felt connection is pretty much confirmed. What I truly want an answer to is -- Kankri, was last week's attack a consequence, direct or not, of whatever it is you did for the Felt?"

Kankri has gone statue-still; only his eyes burn, the way Karkat's do sometimes, red glow highlighting his cheekbones, his eyelashes, the underside of his eyebrows. It looks like glow-in-the-dark eye shadow.

"Were the Felt who you needed me to protect you from? Who you accepted being incarnated in order to escape?"

Karkat shoves out of his nest and lands between the beds with a thump, stalks toward Rose, one wing curved up so the blade-tips of its long fingers fan out. Kankri is so still he doesn't seem to even be breathing.

"Are you fucking done torturing him, you herniated asshole? He can't even _fart_ without confirming it one way or the other! Are you _trying_ to stress-test his orders to see which one breaks first or what?!"

Welp. "He's kind of right, sis," Dave says. "Besides, it's not like we don't already know, even if Kankri can't confirm it. That's kind of... already confirmation."

Rose sighs, shoulders relaxing. "You're right. My apologies, Kankri."

"You merely acted in a way in which you are perfectly entitled," Kankri replies urbanely. The glow of his eyes is banked, but still present on his eyelashes, through the locks of hair across his smaller pair of eyes.

"That does not mean it was not cruel," Rose counters, distant like she would debate something she has zero stakes in, which of course for Rose means 'heads up, sincerity and soul-baring on sale in aisle seven.'

"Indeed, it does not." He inclines his head toward Rose, eyes gone dim and at rest once again.

Deflating, Karkat grumbles and turns away, hops back up on his crowded bed. Dave fleetingly regrets not inviting him on his instead, but considering he's more lying down than sitting and takes up a lot of the length of it, and Karkat's stash is on the other bed, he doubts he'd have gotten a positive reply.

His phone pings him before he can find a topic of conversation to take everyone away from the almost-argument. Oh hey, that works. He lifts it up, shakes it so people will look. "Hey, wow, people love me! It's..." He reads. "It's Burnett saying sorry she hasn't visited yet blahblah tons of paperwork. Wow, what an asshole."

 _Be damn sure I will drop by to **talk** , though. My silver watch, you ass_, the email is saying. _My KIDS gave me that watch!_

He reads it out, and then types, and says, "It made for a super pretty boom. Damara said it was delicious."

(Damara said no such thing, but she totally would have, he's sure.)

He hits send. Jade is rolling her eyes and laughing at him.

"Talking about Damara, though." He looks up at Kankri. "Can I get an explanation in layman's terms about what the heck you did to her and Latula and me, or are you gonna be cryptic like Karkat and let us figure it out?"

Kankri gives a long, slow blink, made even slower with the big eyes blinking first and then the little ones -- the opposite direction from the way Karkat does it.

"Why, I would think it was obvious." And then he _closes his mouth_.

"... Karkat, can you kick him a bit pretty please."

Karkat looks like he doesn't know who he'd rather be an ass to more. "Hm. Hmmm... No dice."

"Damn it."

"Could you do it to me?" Jade asks Kankri, brightly curious. "Rose said it was like she was channeling a Seer of Light. It sounds pretty awesome, I'd love to try!"

"My apologies, Detective Harley, it requires a great deal of power and is not to be used frivolously. I don't believe Detective Lalonde will enjoy paying that tab a second time, at any rate."

Dave's brows furrow a little. Asking about the price of a demon you're not channeling is a bit -- there's no telling what it is, and it could be hella embarrassing, so it's not really polite. At the same time Kankri makes it sound unpleasant enough that he's feeling vaguely concerned.

Rose hums, thoughtful. "Mmh. Maybe once. For research. But I'd probably do it on myself."

She turns to Dave, smiles slow and shrewd.

"Dave? How did it feel to you? What did you observe?"

Yeah, she knows what he's going to say, he can read it in the way she steals glances at Kankri's face. He says it anyway.

"Didn't feel like I was channeling anything. Damara and Latula were just hanging on. Felt like --"

Kankri's mouth has gone pursed with unsurprised, resigned annoyance. Fuck, Dave was _right_.

"Felt like _I_ was the Knight of Time." He pauses, briefly unsure. "It was a Knight's power, right? Never met one, so I have no clue how it manifests, but it was definitely Time. Holy shit, Jade, _I time-traveled_."

"... No way."

"Yes way, all the ways, this is now the interstate, everyone onboard the monster truck convoy, I went back in time like thirty seconds or a minute and _there were two of me_. That was the tightest shit _ever_. Shit, I should have given myself a fist bump, that was an unforgivable lapse on my part. Then again the universe might have collapsed under the singularity of coolness we'd have made so maybe it's a good thing. But then again, again, even if the universe went boom it might have been totally worth it, Jade, I time-traveled."

She's laughing. He bets it's an _envious_ laugh. "You told me that already!"

"I completely time-traveled. Only once, but--"

"Twice," Karkat corrects with a strange rasp in his voice. He stares at Dave from under his bangs, chin tucked mulishly, spine blades half-up. "Twice, only the first time you _died_."

"--Oh, right. Yeah." His own body slipping out of his arms, thumping to the ground. Eyes open onto nothing, mouth hanging stupid. He'd been doing his level best to forget.

Jade straightens up, smile falling away.

"He did," Rose confirms. "I do believe he then chose, based upon the evidence of his corpse, not to engage in the course of action that resulted in said corpse, upon which it disappeared."

"It was not so much 'decide' as 'be too freaked out to go with Damara's super helpful suggestions after all,' but yeah. I changed my mind so that timeline stopped existing, I guess."

"Good thing the other you went back to a time before you'd decided," Jade says, looking disturbed. "Can you make a note to always do that if it happens again, please? Look before looping?"

Dave shrugs. "Sure thing." If he can afford -- uh, if it ever happens again, he means. He is not actually suicidal, he just -- there are more important things than his assured survival. He supposes.

... If he died Karkat would die too.

"... Yeah, okay. I'll be careful."

It cools him down a little bit, and then he realizes he's tired. He shuffles a little farther down against the headboard, makes himself comfortable. He listens to his two best girls debate and theorize on Blood and Kankri's abilities and even Karkat's, why not, throws in a word here or there, laughs silently and with his face still when Karkat and Kankri bicker again.

It's like a wave of sounds, Jade's clear alto, Rose's slightly veiled, slightly lower voice, Karkat and Kankri's cicada-buzzing undertones. They have the same voice too, it's funny to notice, only they don't use it the same way at all. Karkat shifts his lower, to make his threats more impressive, and then forgets himself, and the cadence of their words is... Kankri drones with nary a word higher than the other, Karkat throws words like they're bullets with a grenade mixed in here and there. If Kankri is the metronome, he'd be the drums, cymbals included. And then there's Jade's melody, so many lilting inflections, and Rose's...

Rose's strange little hitches, barely-there pauses.

He listens.

"Sis?"

"Hmm?"

"I know your like your vocab pompous, but there any reason why you haven't used the word 'and' even once in the last fifteen minutes?"

It's the way her face freezes, for not even a second, that makes him sit up.

He pushes down his shades. She stares back, faking puzzled, and then openly annoyed, and then she looks away, down at her knees.

"What was the word again?" she asks, casual except not, and he's starting to guess what she's telling him.

"And. You know, instead of 'as well as' or 'together with' or 'furthermore'. Crazy useful, that word."

"An," she tries. It's just a nasal noise. "An...t? No, that's something else." She looks up, smiles, lips closed. "Sorry, it slipped away."

Kankri's eyes are closed halfway and he's smiling a Buddha smile, a cat who got the cream smile.

"Holy shit!" Jade exclaims. "Is that your price? You _eat words_?"

Kankri blinks placidly. "Indeed."

"Mother _fuck_." But Rose _loves_ words, even more than Dave does! Shit.

Such an everyday word too. 'And.'

"What other words did he take?"

She rolls her eyes. "Dave, if I remembered them, they wouldn't be taken, now would they?"

... Yeah, okay. He stares at Kankri. "Well?"

Kankri's tail curls in a circle behind him, his toes wriggle. "Murmurous. Petrichor. Tintinnabulation. Embrocation. Verdigris. A list of horse-riding terms -- martingale. Paddock. Weanling. Sometimes she will read me medical dictionaries."

He's almost purring, cricket chirps lining his hushed voice. Rose mouths the words to herself after him, but by her faintly displeased, unsurprised expression, she can't keep them in mind.

"We usually stay with the prettier, less used words. A plain but frequently used word doesn't, as you could say, _taste_ as good, but it does contain quite a lot more power than one hardly used, or learned expressly to be lost a scant second later."

"I admit it does make a lot of sense that there would be a simple, easy term to signify the joining of two items," Rose says, almost lightly. "Ah, don't make that face, Dave, it's not as if I can never learn them again. They'll just require effort as well as a lot of repetition, is all."

"Effort _and_ repetition," Dave corrects, knowing it's kind of bitchy, and not sure why he's so bothered. Some demons demand way worse things. (Just not any that are sanctioned by the police, usually.)

He's not sure how he feels about Kankri right now.

"Effort _un_ repetition?" she tries

"No, you went French on my butt, Rose, why'd you have to do that, do I look French to you, how the hell do you even pronounce that sound, it's not even real."

"That is remarkably ethnocentric," Kankri remarks. Dave restrains the urge to snap at him. He's a demon, he does demon things, no one was tricked here. Rose probably knew even before incarnating him; she couldn't have kept him fed otherwise, since he won't take sex.

He wonders if Karkat's price is anything like that. If it's worse.

"Well, I'm not sure I want to try the thing myself now," Jade says, shoulders slumped. "I mean, next he'll ask for 'or' or 'I'."

"That is an intriguing suggestion," Kankri says, looking politely intrigued. Karkat snorts.

"It wasn't a shopping list."

"Well I guess it's not too bad? I'm starting to run out of room for Feferi's aquariums, and you guys wouldn't believe how much money and time the upkeep takes. I mean, seriously, I've had to knock down a wall and put up a floor to ceiling aquarium instead! You guys should come and see, it's pretty neat, but now my landlord hates me, like, three tons. I wonder what Jane's place looks like."

"Most of her rooms are wall-to-wall aquariums, plus an aquarium pillar in the living room," Rose says. "She has an octopus."

Dave snorts quietly.

What's done is done, at any rate. They're alive. Kankri's trick saved their asses, so it might not have been too expensive after all.

If it were Karkat's price he'd pay it without looking back, even. Could make torturing his sentences into hilarious rambly messes even funnier. And hey, maybe if Kankri is getting fed properly, Karkat will get jealous and tell Dave his own price, if he asks...

"He will not, alas," Kankri says, looking straight at him, and Dave gives a full-body twitch.

"Okay, no, do not seer at me out of the blue like that, that's not on. I've got a reasonable expectation of privacy here and I intend to keep it."

Kankri's chin rises and he squints at Dave down his nose. "You might not be aware, but when you think about that particular topic, it is exactly as if you were placing it a short distance from my open eyes without warning and only afterwards asking me not to look. My apologies, Detective, I am sadly privileged to be in possession of working eyes, metaphorical and otherwise, and if your thoughts are so private then may I suggest behaving in less of an exhibitionistic manner?"

"Oh, wow, you thought that was exhibitionistic. That's neat, bro, you have fun definitions." _IT'S OKAY_ , he thinks as hard as he can as Jade splutters out a laugh, _I LIKE FEEDING KARKAT THE SEXUAL WAY TOO._ He shies away from visuals but boy does he concentrate on the feeling he gets in his belly when Karkat arches his back or lets him touch his thighs.

"That was _entirely_ unnecessary. Non-consensually exposing me to--"

"If you turdbreaths are talking about what I think you're talking about _I am going to bite you both_." He glares hotly at Dave, a hand planted on the mattress like he's about to vault over and kick him in the face. " _I can **feel** it_ ," he hisses -- quietly, which doesn't stop Rose and Jade from hearing it. They blink, start looking even more gleefully, evilly interested. Bluh.

Okay, yeah, it's getting too embarrassing to keep needling. Face far too warm, Dave reclines sulkily into his pillows. "He's the one voyeuring it up," he mutters. Karkat's eyes thin into slits.

Before he has to bite anyone, someone knocks at the door, loud and precise. Dave knows who it is before they even push it open.

He could have done without the confirmation, because when Captain Egbert comes in, it's with a look on his face that implies he heard way too much of the conversation.

"Detectives," he says, "Mr. and Mr. Vantas."

When he chases off the girls to grill Dave up and down about last week's clusterfuck Dave is still a little glad.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scene with the OCs is def. one I'd trim some if this was a book, but this isn't a book and I was having fun so y'all get to deal with my ramblings. Muahaha.

The first thing Karkat does when they finally come home is to rush up the ladder and check on his nest, wings flapping along pointlessly. (The new shell is still frail enough that they have to alternate keeping the muscles exercised and making sure no wrong movement cracks him open again, but to return home he refused to be bandaged up.)

Dave's shoulder is still not to be strained, and climbing would be awkward one-handed, so once again he's right back to sleeping on the couch. He's starting to think the universe wants him to cede the space to his demon, but damn it, he is not giving up his futon under the slanting ceiling and the odd light that comes from the window.

"Marshmallows still good?" he calls up to Karkat, even as he flops down on the couch under the mezzanine.

"Uh -- lemme open the bag." A pause. "Yeah, they're still edible, though I was more concerned about rats or those motherfucking crows."

Dave snorts quietly. He can't say he was honestly worried about the marshmallows, those things last _years_. Okay, at least half a year. He's pretty sure he read things about that before.

The crow vendetta keeps being silly and hilarious.

"We don't have rats!" he calls up.

"Uh huh," Karkat replies, muffled and distracted, as he rummages into a plastic bag. "You keep thinking that."

Aw, man. "We have rats? Seriously? Hell."

"If they're not rats I'm not sure what else. Wall wolverines?"

Blargh. Dave reclines against the back of the couch, eyes closed. He watched too much TV at the hospital, turning it on sounds even worse than doing nothing.

Since he's doing nothing, hey.

He gets the candle and the matches, sets them on the coffee table before him. A little flame -- there.

_Aradia. Aradia, Aradia, Aradia, spring after winter when it's getting nice and warm and you almost don't notice the bite of frost still lurking in every shadow, and time keeps turning and soon winter will come again, but..._

_So will spring! Hey, Dave, been a while. I was starting to think you'd stopped liking me!_

His lips crook into a tiny smile. His eyes stay closed. _Preposterous. I'd even say unpossible. It was just that slight case of Damara-induced brush with mortality..._

_Pff, you brush against mortality every day, you guys are all in each other's grill, it's pretty cuddly as relationships go._

A snort. _Thanks for the reminder, Aradia. Where would I be without it, thinking I was immortal and shit._

_Probably dead!_

"... Yeeeeah, that was the implication there."

"Who are you talking to?" Karkat asks, peering over the edge of the mezzanine.

"Aradia. Wanna say hi?"

"No. Pay her more, so you get to have her around instead of Damara next time."

Aradia giggles in his head. Or maybe cackles, but in a pretty cute way. It almost doesn't sound vaguely evil! (It's evil in a fun way, at least, instead of a vicious, hateful way, so hey, he'll take what he can get.) _I like the way he thinks. Oh, I know a surefire way for you to outbid that other summoner! Actually, pretty much the only way, considering your respective resources._

Dave wonders what that other summoner pays for her services. Maybe they're the type who has hours to waste on meditation. "Yeah? What is it?"

He gets the feeling of a cheerful, hopeful grin. _Can I have a dead Dave?_

... Huh.

Huh.

_I'm not asking for Dave Prime's death! Just a branching Dave. It'd still be you enough to be pretty powerful._

"Huh."

_Also I've been wondering how you'd taste for a while now, and you're going to live so long!_

"Sixty-six years is not that long. I mean, it's average I guess..."

He'd still be old and slow and probably in pain from all the bones he's broken and articulations he's fucked up in his life and unable to kick much ass, so. He doesn't regret it too horribly. Better a few painful, boring years shaved off the end of his life than that building destroying the street, his coworkers crushed underneath. It was worth the trade.

Does creating an alternate Dave in order to kill him count as murder or suicide? Self-sacrifice, maybe -- considering he'd be him, he'd know why it was necessary... But wouldn't it be hard, to be the alternate instead? Could he -- either of them -- do it in cold blood?

But wouldn't it be necessary? How much easier would the fight against Kurloz have gone with Aradia with him, willing and eager to fight, maybe even eager to collaborate with Kankri's thing, instead of Damara?

"Do you know what Kankri did? I mean, what he can do? With his -- like -- using demons to..." He doesn't know how to word it. He waves his hand vaguely. Karkat is still peering at him, chewing on marshmallows. "I could act as a Knight of Time. I don't think it really hurt Latula or Damara -- would you be okay with that?"

 _Huh. Yeah, I heard a bit about Blood things. Sounds potentially fun, but I don't know how much I'd like being tangled up in you when you're in danger like that... I'd probably do it for a dead Dave though!_ she says with a mental eyebrow waggle.

Dave sighs. "I'm not saying you can't ever have one straight off the bat, hon, but I don't even know how I managed the dead Dave the first time, so you'd have to explain--"

Karkat _snarls_.

He throws the marshmallow bag on the floor -- huh -- swings himself over the railing, lands hard on the table, which creaks but somehow doesn't break. (His claws leave gouges in the wood.) And then he's in Dave's space, bristled all over, eyes glowing, pouncing to plant his hands on the cushions around his head. Dave's head bounces with the impact.

"You are not allowed to fucking die," Karkat snarls, his bristly bangs tickling Dave's eyelids, "no you is allowed to die, you can't ever fucking do that again, do you hear me? Zero yous, none of the yous, you are staying the fuck alive and if that means we end up with a dozen bleached turds in shades in this apartment then _good!_ "

He looks... Furious, yes. Dave is pretty sure they have achieved Spittle.

Also panicked, underneath.

"Is this where I make the Dave Strider harem joke," Dave says, dumbly, because he's a dumbass.

He only figures out a second later that Karkat's forehead just impacted with him straight on. Ow! One of his hands rises to rub at his face -- it gets grabbed by a hand like a shackle; Karkat headbutts him again. Not as hard, this time, mostly to get his attention, and he swears because his eyes are watering and mother _fuck_ , did Karkat just _attack_ him? It makes no sense, he can't _do_ that. Dave just stares at him, at the incandescent eyes only two inches away from his.

"Are you _listening_ to me," Karkat rasps. His throat is full of snakes. Dave's mouth opens and a hard palm pushes against his mouth, claw-tips come to press lightly against his cheekbone, fan out over his jaw. "You will not deliberately kill _any iteration of you_."

Aradia is laughing her incorporeal ass off. Dave is mostly poleaxed.

"What the hell," he says. (Okay, he actually says "Mffthll." It's the intent that counts.) He could do it mentally, even if it's harder without the focus that speaking gives to intent, but he's too baffled to grab onto Karkat's Name and force him off.

He tugs on his wrist and it barely moves, Karkat's hold doesn't slip at all, he's caught. He's caught and _gagged_.

Jesus.

He knows Karkat has got to feel his reaction, he's certainly mentioned he could enough times, but that expression on his gray face, that furious fear...

Dave lifts his free hand, cups Karkat's cheek gently. When he turns his face to the side, Karkat lets his own hand drop, freeing Dave's mouth.

"You want to tell me what exactly this is about, buddy?" he asks, cautious. "It's not the first time I've almost died on the job."

Oh. Oh fuck, he's shaking, Karkat is, no, this is wrong, very wrong, horribly wrong. Dave tries to tug him closer and Karkat resists all of two seconds before pouring himself onto Dave's lap, knees squeezing his hips like Dave is a wild horse, armored arms wound around his neck.

He mumbles something in Dave's neck. It takes Aradia repeating cheerfully, _he says it's the first time he's killed you!_ for him to understand.

 _... Huh. I see._ He hugs and squeezes back, even though Karkat probably barely feels the pressure and there are those long, dangerous blades to navigate down his spine. They're bristled up far enough to allow him to slip his wrists safely in between. _Mind wandering off and giving us a little while? I'll call you back._

 _Aw, not fun,_ she says, but then she leaves his brainspace. Might still be around and watching, but so long as she doesn't distract him from this he doesn't care if she voyeurs it up.

"Karkat--"

"I killed you. I don't care that it wasn't -- it wasn't the you my current me was bound to -- it wasn't him, but it was still a _you_ , I still fucking _impaled you through the ribcage_ and then you _died_ , we have a _contract_ and I just--"

\--Oh. The contract. (Haha, what else. Hah.) Right. He closes his eyes, works his fingers into Karkat's hair at the back of his head, still holding him close. He didn't think how nasty it might feel to a demon to come so close to breaking his own contract. Not like redundant timeline clones are common enough happenstances to be mentioned in a standard clause.

"You didn't break it. You didn't deliberately kill him, anyway. Moron appeared in front of you as you were attacking. Not your fault. I'm not sure what _he_ was thinking though. What a brainless asshole."

Haha yeah right he doesn't know. He was thinking _Karkat is about to be mowed down by that huge son of a bitch let's get in the middle_. He isn't sure if other-him just assumed he'd get a brand-new idea while staring death in the face or what, but that's a very Dave thought to have had. He can recognize himself just fine in that localized clusterfuck.

"I don't _care_ it's not my fault, it was my attack, _it was my blood_ , and since when did intent count for jack _fucking_ shit?"

Karkat tightens his hold on Dave's shoulders and neck. Dave starts feeling a little smothered. He... doesn't really mind. When Karkat holds on so tight, so desperately, it almost feels like...

... well.

"Promise me you won't," Karkat rasps against his neck, head bowed, the shafts of his quills pressed against Dave's jaw, his temple. "It's -- every time one of you dies, I _fail_. Even if it doesn't count, I still -- I still fail and you're still dead except you're not dead on a _technicality!_ It -- it feels _really fucking shitty_ , why doesn’t your language have better words for this, it just--"

Dave kisses the corner of his mouth; Karkat stutters to a stop, inhales sharply through his nose.

"I can't promise you I won't. Might have to, and I -- well. Duty. You know how it is." Eyes clenched shut in fury, Karkat starts growling, rattling. Dave rubs his cheek against Karkat's, velvet cheek and armored cheekbone, so warm.

He would never place such a caveat on himself, if it was just him, but. Well. The point he really should wrap his brain around already is that it's not, anymore.

"I give you my word -- it'll stay a very last resort." Nose to nose, his eyes meeting Karkat's over his shades, and then he gives him a tiny, tiny smile. "This I do swear."

"On your name," Karkat asks, just as quietly.

"On my name, Dave Lalonde Strider, Knight of Time."

He can't help but smile when he's done. It sounds silly from him, middle name and all, and besides it means nothing. Nothing here is binding him but his own decisions, and free will means he could change his mind tomorrow (Karkat would hate him, but he's bound tight enough that it wouldn't affect his trustworthiness any); but it's... It's charming too. Makes his heart do improbable acrobatic feats in there, the way Karkat's spine loosens against his bracing arm, the way he slumps just that little bit against Dave's chest.

They both know it means nothing, because last resort is still subject to some measure of personal judgment, and Dave's judgment is...

... he doesn't think he'd enjoy freaking Karkat out like that again if he doesn't have a really awesome reason, though. Shit, the sorry bastard must have been stewing over it for the whole two weeks they were in the hospital.

"Was that why you were so cuddly when I woke up?"

Karkat headbutts him -- not that hard, but right in the middle of what Dave is sure will soon be an impressive bruise. "I told you already it was because of the blood transfusion!" he sputters, and then he breaks eye contact. Not suspicious! Dave doesn't suspect a thing.

"Uh huh."

"Shut up."

"Mm, yep. Sure thing."

He gets nipped on the jaw for his trouble, sharp enough that he almost expects blood. But no, despite all other amendments and loose interpretations of orders, blooding Dave without permission is still going to be pretty damn well restricted.

Karkat rolls his hips over Dave's lap, his ass rubbing hard against Dave's thighs. He nips him again, his earlobe this time. "Shut up and put your grabby bits on my ass cheeks. I'm starved half to death, I should have thrown you down and ridden you on the welcome mat."

Ngh. "Oh fuck yes." Nibbles down the side of his neck. Dave tries not to gasp. "That -- would have been a plan. Mnh. Nice to know I rate lower than checking on your marshmallows."

He slides his hands down, since he was invited to, fits them to the slope of Karkat's lower back. Velvet under his thumbs; he runs them against the swell of Karkat's ass, against the sides of his tail, which flicks at the touch.

He kisses Karkat's mouth lightly, nuzzles his face, even as his hands curve along the underside of Karkat's thighs, knead at those sensitive places where they become the bottom curve of his ass.

His fingertips are close to demon crotch. He doesn't go there. He just kisses Karkat's nose, and kneads at his double handful (Karkat grunts, and then frowns like he's annoyed at his own reaction).

And then Dave smirks a little bit, pretends he's not hard enough to pound nails, and tells Karkat, "This is not distracting me from the mild harm thing. By the way. In case you were wondering."

Karkat huffs in annoyance, even as he burrows into Dave's neck and his back arches, pressing his weight into Dave's hands. "Whatever. Knew it was a one-shot. I really don't regret using it when I did. Keep -- nnh. Keep doing that."

Note to self: Karkat enjoys getting his butt fondled. Yeah, Dave doesn't think he's going to forget that anytime soon. His previously-dislocated shoulder is starting to ache under the strain; he shifts a little, tries to let Karkat's shivers distract him. It doesn't entirely succeed, but it succeeds enough to keep going.

"Feels good?" he asks, attempting casual.

"Mngh." Signs point to yes. Rolling booty types of signs. "It's -- totally unnecessary, but--"

"Mn--what is?"

"Me feeling good!" Karkat snaps, and then burrows against his neck again. "I was talking to people on the internet and they said only a psycho would enjoy it if their partner wasn't, though, so... whatever. I mean, obviously that's not at all what I'm in this for, this is _feeding_ , but if it helps your strange mammalian instincts then -- then whatever."

Dave leans back to stare at him in disbelief, hands gone still on his ass, two fingers still raised to lift his tail.

" _I've been trying to tell you exactly that from the beginning._ "

Karkat leans back as well, furrows his brows, purses his mouth in disapproval. Dave glowers back.

"How come you totally miss the point when it's me, but some random assholes over the internet send it to you with a couple lawls attached and suddenly you get it?! This is so gigantically unfair I have no words for it. Wow."

Karkat makes an annoyed cricket-hiss noise. "Do you _want_ me to headbutt you again? Because I will find it in me to make that sacrifice. I'm starving so badly I'm not even in a hurry to feed anymore and you're whining about -- _khsssst_."

He attacks Dave's neck, pointy teeth pressing and releasing their way down his throat, his jugular vein. Dave groans (annoyance or lust, he doesn't even know) and gives in. His still-healing shoulder is twanging its displeasure, so he takes that arm out of full extension; he needs to undo his zipper anyway. He rummages awkwardly between them, knuckles nudging Karkat's soft belly, fishes his dick out.

"Be nice if I could get fully undressed one day," he mumbles against Karkat's shoulder, and gives himself a long, slow pull -- the last spat softened him a bit.

Karkat's tail _quivers_ against the back of his hand -- it's probably shaking like a lamb's and he can't see it, god. He captures it in his hand, squeezes the bottom of it and lets it glide out of his fingers the same way his other hand pumps up his dick. (He doesn't have spines to avoid, but he still doesn't close his fingers all the way around himself, just because.)

"Mnh." One of Karkat's gauntleted hands cups his (healthy) shoulder, kneads with the balls of his palm, knife-claws brushing ticklishly against his shirt. Shit, Dave needs his shirt off _now_.

Karkat presses their cheeks together and his hand slides between them and is he going to touch Dave's dick? Fuck yes, though it's not the best angle by far to guarantee a lack of slicey on his baloney. He doesn't push Karkat's questing hand off his wrist, at any rate.

He can _feel_ Karkat hesitate, pressed as tight as they are together.

"Give me your hand," he says, rough and low. Dave does.

When he realizes where Karkat is guiding it he stops breathing, too.

It's so, _so_ soft between his thighs, velvet and the gentle swell of his mound. Dave doesn't turn his hand palm up, lets Karkat guide the side of Dave's fingers against himself. Karkat is tense all over and if Dave startles him away now he'll probably die.

The pads of his fingers caress Karkat's inner thigh in passing. He can feel damp trailing against his pointer finger.

"A-alright." Karkat butts their heads together, rough, nervous, and then he loosens his hold. "Just -- careful. I will bite, don't think I won't, I don't care if I can't, I--"

Dave kisses him, wet and slow, coaxing his mouth open. So many pointy teeth in there, but Karkat's tongue is hot and after the first confused grunt he licks back, lapping at Dave's exploring tongue with his oh-so-slightly-raspy one.

Dave cups Karkat's crotch, not so lightly it will tickle -- he hopes -- not caressing yet, just _touching_ , holding, and his shoulder is going to hurt so bad, he should change hands but.

So, so warm down there, so soft and a little wet (oh) and the way Karkat quivers against him...

"Still nothing inside!" he breaks the kiss to say, a bit shrill, clinging to Dave's shoulders. Dave nods, eyes closed, head tilted against his.

He caresses him, back and forth, gentle -- with his whole hand, with his palm, and he tries not to let the tip of his middle finger press down against that slit.

He thinks it's... maybe opening a little, because that's not velvet under his fingertips, it's slick and burning-hot and not shelled even a little bit, not even flexibly so, the way his belly and inner thighs feel under the fuzz.

Karkat is shaking all over; he twitches between freezing and pushing, rubbing down against Dave's hand, freezing again. Trying to find the angle that works best. Dave kisses him a second time, languid and deep, tongue moving inside his mouth the way he wishes he could fuck him, long and slow.

Karkat goes up on his knees without warning, rearing off him, and Dave's hand almost follows; he lets it fall, making a small disappointed noise in his mouth. (They're still kissing. He's glad for that.) His hand is oddly cold.

Karkat nips his lip -- almost slices the inside of it, Dave's sad when he doesn't -- and growls into his mouth, frustration more than anger.

"Why does it feel so much worse when you do it?!"

"... Wow." Dave levels a flat stare at his demon. "Thanks. I'm really flattered. I mean it, such honeyed words, I'm gonna swoon, quick someone catch me, I can't resist the suave there, oh, oh, gonna burst out of my bodice--"

Oh, mouth of Karkat. Not a French kiss this time, just lips pressed against his, brief and hard.

"Shut _up_ , Assturd McMotormouth. I wasn't trying to seduce you -- when am I ever, fuck -- it's a fact, I can touch myself there okay but it's fucking intolerable when it's you."

Dave takes in a deep, long breath and tries to release his stupid whining along with it when he breathes out. It's hella flattering that Karkat would be oversensitive to his touch, actually. Flattering in a way that makes him cup himself and give his Stridernator a squeeze, because _fuck_.

"Yeah, uh. That's -- that's normal. Like how when you massage your own skull it's okay, and when you go to the hairdresser and they wash it, it's more like, oh my little Jesus please make sweet love to my scalp for another hour, yes, fuck yes."

He, uh, might have put in too much acting in this last sentence; the begging moans sounded pretty much just like the real thing. It's not at all because he's jerking it while thinking about Karkat overwhelmed and lost and letting him touch him anyway, for the record.

Karkat's hand curls cautiously around Dave's hand; Dave slows down briefly, but then he starts up again and Karkat just follows, like he wants to feel the way Dave does it, like he wants to help.

Dave licks his dry lips. "Do you -- want me to -- like. Try again? Later? Carefuler?"

"Mnh. No, it's fine. I didn't mind -- it was nice. No, nice is the wrong word, but I--"

Dave can't help smiling, dopey and half-drunk with pleasure and affection. "You liked it?"

Karkat's lip juts out in a vaguely grumpy pout. "... Maybe a bit." He tightens his hand on Dave's a bit, teases his fingers with delicate claw tips. So close to his dick, and they'd slip between his fingers so easily. The risk is a little bit hot.

The fact that Karkat is so cautious about making sure it doesn't happen is better.

"Wish I could get you off," he pants in Karkat's shoulder. "Wish I could -- make you come -- and it didn't mess with you so bad, and you just -- it's so great, wish I knew how to get you there--"

"Your father figure has been emailing me links about getting someone with no penis off," Karkat says -- casual, thoughtless, making Dave burst out laughing against his collarbone even as he groans, "noooo!" "I assume I'm supposed to forward them to you. I don't even know if I have a clitoris."

"Yeah," Dave manages to reply once he has laughed enough. "That's the problem. Looks like you've got nothing, where the hell do you even pee from, it is a mystery."

He is going to die of blue balls. Blue balls and laughter. He's still battling giggle fits as he pumps his dick. Still hard, but the urgency has gone a bit.

His shoulder hurts. Fuck. He switches hands, awkward and sore, hissing a little bit as he tries to find a good position for his injured arm and his newly dick-holding hand both.

"Hell, why did I not learn to jerk off with both hands. Tragic -- fucking -- oversight..."

Karkat pulls back a little to stare at him, eyebrow quirked, and then he shuffles off Dave's lap entirely. Nooo, nonono --

He lifts Dave's knees and swings them onto the couch. "Turn sideways." Dave does. Karkat climbs back on top of him, a hand on his chest guiding him down against the arm rest.

He takes Dave's hand off himself, guides his hurt arm in a comfortable folded position on his chest, and then he shuffles forward until Dave's dick is nestled between his thighs, and he starts to rock.

The hold isn't tight enough -- and Karkat isn't about to grind his crotch down on Dave's dick, not after his last overload. But the sight, and the teasing little brushes, the way he braces a hand by Dave's head and looms over him, fuck, yes, so many worlds of yes. Dave plants his heels on the cushions, rocks with him, fits himself to his beat.

It's quiet now, only panting and cloth rustling quietly -- the couch springs, barely audible. It's dim under the mezzanine and under Karkat's body, under his wings spread like a net, like he wants to surround Dave as much as he possibly can.

It's ridiculous how tender they make him feel, those wings, so stunted and useless and almost _whole_ , almost fine, fine soon, even with the funny discolored scars where the shell got cracked open.

He'd touch them with his other hand if Karkat's hand wasn't still on his wrist, keeping it pinned safely against his chest.

Dave brushes his free hand down Karkat's shoulder, against Karkat's badge, and down his long smooth hard-shelled arm and the violently red ropes of apparent tendons. He worms it between Karkat's legs -- he's going to destroy his wrist. He uses the flat of his palm to press his dick against a velvet thigh; they speed up the beat, and he gives everything he can muster of his failing mental faculties to winding his will around Karkat's Name and imagining himself deeper between those thighs, buried where it's slick and burning-hot.

He comes with a strangled gasp, a burst of white behind his eyelids, a burst of warmth blooming in his body from the hips out, and he goes slack on the couch and pants and melts into the cushions. Karkat lifts himself, frees Dave's hand (Dave wouldn't even have bothered), leans down to lick at his exposed throat.

"Want -- want blood? D'you get enough?"

"It was fine," Karkat says, eyes heavy-lidded, and gives a longsuffering look at the wet splatters down his thigh. "I'll want another meal in under twelve hours, though, think you can?"

Dave is completely floppy with the aftermath of pleasure and he still throws a thumbs up instantly. "Oh hell yeah, no problem."

Karkat drags himself off him, climbs on the coffee table on his way to the wider floor. "I don't think I'll bother letting you fondle me next time. I'll just go down on you."

"Oh heeeell yeah. Motherfucking _score_."

He's rummaging in the bag Dave dropped by the door. Huh. "We'll have to set a strict schedule, because I am really fucking starved, and you can't imagine how much that tomfoolery set me back in terms of regaining my full power on this ridiculous plane of existence."

Oh no. _Schedule?_ "I get the feeling I just walked into a very sexy trap."

Karkat snorts, and throws a wad of cloth at him from the other end of the room. It lands on the back of the couch and flops back into his face.

"Put your sling on already. I'm taking a shower and then making pasta, just take a nap or something."

Dave obediently puts on the sling. Wouldn't want to roll over and sleep on his bad arm or something. "Any of the pasta for me?"

"Maybe the burnt bits at the bottom of the pan, if there are any," Karkat returns casually, and walks into the bathroom.

"Aw, come _on_ ," Dave groans, and lays back down for a nap. "How'd you want me to feed you right if I'm all weakened with hunger my own self?"

"Not my problem!" Karkat calls from the bathroom. "But you know what, I'll trade you a pasta meal for a pint of ice cream."

Yeah, ice cream is going to become a staple of Karkat's diet soonish, he thinks. "Done. You are the most generous, it is you."

"I want strawberry. With real fruit chunks in."

Dave wants his kitchen not to be a burned mess, but Karkat is actually pretty good at machines and technology -- case in point, he already thumb-types faster than Dave, and Dave doesn't have claws he needs to avoid piercing the keys with. "Mmh."

It's probably safe to fall asleep, so that's what he does, listening to the shower drumming on.

\--

Two days later he's applying styling foam to his impeccably coiffed locks and ignoring the way his legs still want to shake -- note to self, shower sex is less woozyfying when the water is not left on boiling-hot -- when he leans forward to fix a lock into the perfect "accidentally tousled" configuration and... huh.

Okay, is he imagining things maybe.

He leans in toward the bathroom mirror, cranes his head so more light will fall on his irises.

"Is your hair _still_ not done? I'm not greeting your guests for you!"

"Uh, almost," he calls back through the bathroom door, distracted.

"You're not trying to attract any of them as a mate, so why the fuck does it matter. It looks the same anyways, only now it stinks!"

"It's just fun is all." Huh. Yeah, he's about 70% sure that the little spokes running from his pupils to the rims of his irises didn't use to be so... zigzaggy.

There are some lines now that don't go all the way across, or at least there are more than there were, he's pretty sure. Almost looks like shakily-drawn, irregular teeth, trying and not quite managing to circle his pupils.

"I hear the elevator! Move your geriatric ass and stop fondling your own eyelashes!"

You really have to stare at them from up close to notice. "Okay, if you let me fondle yours!" And it doesn't even look unnatural, it's just, well.

He has crude attempts at sketching clock gears on his eyeballs.

He bets he knows what this dates back from. Be interesting to know if Rose has anything like suns in hers.

"Changed my mind! You can tongue-kiss the shower drain and drown, after all."

He puts on his shades, flicks the lock of hair in place, and walks out, in time to see Karkat arrow for the door and yank it open an instant before Detective Grier can knock.

"Hey," Karkat tells him, gruff but polite, and steps away from the door to let him and Officer O'Dell in.

O'Dell still looks like a Labrador puppy, especially with the eager way he checks out the apartment from his spot -- it's the first time Dave has had him over -- but he does juggle his two pizzas onto his left hand so he can offer his right to Karkat to shake.

Karkat shakes. He hesitates a bit first, but he shakes. John is going to be so jealous. Dave walks up to them to greet them in turn.

"Any news on Burnett?" he asks her partner. Grier nods.

"She's parking. Carpooled with Maguire and Aguilar. Welch will be by a little later."

Dave guides them to the coffee table and its array of chips and things; O'Dell chooses an ottoman to perch on, and Grier sinks into the couch with a little sigh and a vaguely pained grimace.

"Your back?" Karkat asks -- Dave was going to, and he blinks a little.

"Mnh. I'm not young enough to get into that kind of scrape anymore, not like you all." He leans forward to prop his elbows on his knees, gives Karkat a little smile. "It was aching for a while before that, mind."

"You should have stayed home," Karkat opines with a little frown.

"Can't stay home when your partner isn't," Grier replies with philosophical resignation, and lets Dave pour him a drink.

The second batch of guests arrives soon afterwards, Aguilar laughing her butt off over the Karkat flyer that's still pinned in the lobby even as she comes through the door. Burnett is smiling kind of despite herself; Maguire stops himself with a _whoops_ the second he sees Karkat, and then smiles down at him.

"Hey, man. Heuang told me to ask you how it's shakin'."

"--Oh." Karkat's little tail flicks like there's a fly on it for a second, and then he flattens it down self-consciously. "Is she out of the hospital yet?"

"Yeah, but she's still figuring out crutches, her arm was in a cast until two days ago, she'll break it again at this rate -- ah, Detective, hi."

... It's _so fucking adorable_ when Karkat makes friends. Dave unfreezes his face enough to send the dude a tiny approving smile.

Aguilar is touring the living room and peering at everything -- the posters on the walls, the photographs he hung from a string in the corner to dry and forgot to take down and then decided to leave up as decoration, the furniture.

"Didn't take you for a scented candle guy, sir," she throws over her shoulder, along with a grin.

"Masterful deduction. That's Aradia's."

"Oho. Girlfriend?"

Blink. Snerk. "Kind of. She's _definitely_ one of the most important ladies in my life."

"I sense a scandalous affair."

Grier and Burnett, seated at the ends of the couch, are exchanging amused glances.

"Indeed. It is a story of tragic love that could not transcend the barriers of time, space, and the fact that I've got my hands full with one corporeal demon already and besides Karkat would probably eat her if she got in range of his snacks."

Karkat grumbles. "If by snacks we also include -- wait, that's another Bro situation, isn't it."

Dave keeps a straight face somehow. Oh lord. "Okay, who wants what drink? You guys working tomorrow?"

O'Dell and Aguilar are; he gets them beer from the pack Aguilar brought in.

Burnett accepts a whiskey on the rocks, and pretends she is not smirking thinly in Dave's direction. Pretends _really badly_.

"Scented candles, huh? Could have been worse."

Well okay Dave is the one who chooses the scented ones, Aradia doesn't give a crap what they smell like and he just so happens to like patchouli in an entirely ironically sincere way. He takes a seat on one of the chairs and gets himself a coke. "Yeah?"

"Teisat wanted kids."

He almost spits the coke right out. " _Jesus_."

All the officers are staring at her. Burnett chuckles. "Fortunately, so did my husband and I, or I would have had to pass him up, and that would have been pretty sad."

"That's your perfect match, right?" Dave asks, an eyebrow up. "Isn't he _Rage_? I thought asking for babies would be more of a Life thing."

Burnett shrugs. "Would you believe that in twenty-five years I never once bothered to ask him?"

"I wouldn't," Karkat says, eyes narrowed. He picks up a fistful of chips and crunches away, still trying to stare her down.

Welp. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Karkat Vantas, Prince of Tact."

People laugh, some more awkwardly than others. Dave opens a bag of fancy chips and passes it around, and declines to comment on Karkat's frowny face. Man, it'd be cool if Latula could transmit his _topic change, topic change!_

Maybe she does, because Karkat bounds off to the door, and there's Welch, with her hair down for once and wearing jeans.

"Are you out of uniform?" Dave teases, and waves her to the last pouf without getting up. "For shame."

Aguilar mock-glares at him from her own seat. "Wow, the station sure has changed since the last time I was there!"

Welch laughs politely as she leans over to shake hands. "I'm taking evening classes. It's with civilians, so... Ah, yeah, whisky please."

"The Force not enough for you anymore?" Dave deadpans. Welch pinches her lips.

"I'm aiming for your job, sir." Then she hides a smile behind her beer can. "It's summoning classes. Still only the basics though."

"Guess I can keep sleeping soundly for a while longer then."

Grier asks for news about a teacher he knows at Welch's classes. The guys are listening politely; Karkat is frowning at their drinks.

Dave watches him perch on a low round stool, palms pressed to the seat between his thighs for balance. His wing is bound down today, he was sore; still there are shoulder spurs to make his silhouette strange. Dave leans in wordlessly to pour him a glass of lemonade, ignores the vaguely defiant look he gets in return as Karkat snatches it from his hand and cradles it with both of his.

He's like a man in medieval armor, an anachronism seated between colleagues and friends. Dave's fingers itch to take that picture. It'd be even more striking as a black and white silhouette. "Knight Enjoying a Pint With the Local Constabulary."

"But you're not a bit old to start summoning?" Maguire is asking with a little doubtful moue, lips quirked in a way that reminds Dave of the way Rose's mouth looks when Terezi has it. Dave takes a sip so he won't smile. "I mean, you're -- how old?"

Welch snorts through a mouthful of chips. "Twenty-six, thank you very much."

Maguire turns dubious brown eyes on Dave. "How old are you again?"

Dave pretends to think about it. "Oh, at _least_ twenty-three."

Everyone but the other Detectives stares at him. Welp. "Holy sh-- uh. Crap. Wow. How the hell are you a Detective already?"

"Yeah, wow, I think we're all older than you, sir. That's just weird."

O'Dell raises his hand. "I'm twenty-two? Hey, Karkat, how old are you?"

Karkat blinks, thrown. Dave is briefly interested in the answer, before he remembers that, er, yeah.

"I'm a _demon_ , dumbdumb. Time kind of means jack shit to us. You could count it linearly from when I was incarnated, I guess, in which case I win by leagues."

"Or lose by leagues," Dave can't stop himself from saying. "Anyway, about the age thing," he continues before they can descend into snark in front of the guests. "Most of the other young detective-summoners we've got were born close to the same year I was, and if you'll recall, that was the year the hell gate started expanding. It's not a coincidence. Magical contamination means pretty sizeable power levels means it was a bad idea to leave us untrained until college."

"Why, you'd start summoning in your dreams or something?" Maguire asks. Aguilar snorts.

"Noo. Teenagers who can summon? Not like you can completely stop them, so it's probably not a great idea to leave them not knowing how to at least do it right, right?"

"There _was_ some of that," Dave allows, thinking about Bro and Rose. Thinking that Dirk probably did experiment early, but at least he was never caught.

Also no one knows what the fuck is up with Jade and Bec. Was he dog-demony before she tamed him? It is a mystery. She just came back home with a stray one day and that was that, and it took Roxy's mom three years to figure out what was fucking up her readings.

"The main issue's the incarnate classes one and two roaming around the gate. Most of them are shy of people, or they don't like being away from the gate, either or, but when you don't cast for a while your life energy kind of piles up." He shrugs. "Untrained strong threes and above make for pretty tasty bait."

He remembers hearing Jane had screaming nightmares about leading demons through her nice suburbs, getting her neighbors' kids eaten instead of her because they were in the way and running and accidentally attracting the demons' attention. He wasn't scared, personally, because Bro is a fucking badass, and Mom Lalonde is also a badass, and Jade and Jake's grandpa's home was wall to wall rifles, and John's dad was okay, but Jane's dad? He works in an _office_ , Dave also remembers being dubious about the man's ability to lay the smackdown on intruders and protect his turf.

Dave had vague thoughts of coincidentally going to visit his main man Egbert Junior and just happening to save Jane's hot teenage butt with nothing but his thirteen-year-old mangrit, but Bro laughed in his face and then made him start on after-school classes and that was it.

"Wow." Maguire looks all sympathetic and worried, bless his little heart. "You ever get attacked?"

Karkat let out a loud disbelieving snort. "With Calloz around? Yeah, I'd like to see that."

Awgh. Burnett is arching an eyebrow. "My bro's -- boyfriend," Dave lies. ( _Or was it a lie_. Uuuugh.) Dave just really doesn't want to get into the matter of summoning licenses and people who do not have one who _perhaps should_. "Yeah, with that bad dude around we were safe as houses, I barely noticed. Should we open the pizza?"

Pizza is brought out. Fuck yes. Dave grabs the first slice he can and busies himself munching. Grier is asking Maguire for news about his aunt, who it turns out is Captain Maguire of Robbery's wife and they're cousins-aunt/nephew to the second degrees or some shit. Dave thinks he must have met her once at a cookout, but he's met and seen so many police dependents it's a bit like suddenly being parachuted into the middle of the stereotype of the sprawling Southern family Bro tells him they totally have.

Grier seriously knows _everyone_ , this is mildly scary.

"I don't know, we haven't narrowed it down that far yet," Welch is telling her fellow officers. Dave blinks behind his shades and wonders what he's missed.

"Maybe Karkat can tell!" O'Dell leans over the table toward him, looking hopeful. Even kind of puppy-like, to be honest. Karkat looks nonplussed, which is hilariadorable.

"How the fuck would I tell, dumbass, do I look like a sensor class to you?"

"You look like a demon to me," O'Dell points out in a reasonable tone. "I mean, it's pretty much all I can see about you with my eyes. Because, you know, not a summoner, so you could be asking me to see air molecules. Is it oxygen, is it carbon dioxide...?"

"Statistically it'd probably be nitrogen," Burnett points out. (She's more than halfway done with her whisky. Dave hefts the bottle in a silent offer to top her off, which she accepts with a crinkly-eyed smile.)

Karkat is rolling all his eyes. (Then again Dave isn't entirely sure he could roll a pair and not the other pair. He'll have to ask him some day.)

"Oh wait, how could I miss it. It's so obvious. You are..." He squints at O'Dell some. Everyone is already snickering. "You are... A turd of breath."

"Hey!"

"Or was it a turd breath, I always mix them up. Oh well, same difference."

He leans over the table and snatches O'Dell's beer up.

"Oi, oi, come on now--"

"Penalty for being you in my apartment."

He brings the bottle to his mouth. Dave thinks that if other people were there they'd tell him to stop Karkat, maybe, question him. Karkat has never had alcohol before. It's just a beer, and this is the most harmless place for him to try it out. Save for alone with Dave to stave off boredom and loneliness, which strikes Dave as too sad to contemplate.

The truth is the thought of stopping him is fleeting at best and then Karkat is drinking anyway and Dave shrugs it off. Aguilar shoves at O'Dell's shoulder and rags on him as he play-pouts; the guy doesn't look like he even minds getting bullied by Karkat like this, just takes it in stride good-naturedly.

Neither Burnett nor Grier is saying anything, and as his seniors and summoners in their own right they're the only ones who could say anything, so.

Wow, looks like he actually gets to make adult decisions.

His decision is that so does Karkat. Yeah, he's cool with it.

"I wasn't even asking mine! I was asking hers!"

"Heir of Heart," Karkat replies decisively.

"What, really?"

He takes the time to pull a long swallow from the bottle, and then he _smirks_ , the cocky little shit. "I have no fucking clue."

"You should ask Kankri if he'll take a look, but you'd better be ready to bleed for it," Dave suggests. He doesn't want them to just ask, because Rose might pay the price without saying anything and Kankri is unlikely to request blood from her if he can get another word instead.

"Oh my god, I bled too much last time as it is," Maguire protests. "Karkat got me in the thigh, I couldn't walk, and then my hand was full of holes, what the heck even was that."

"Oh like you can talk," Aguilar retorts, and throws a chip at him, "it wasn't even that I ended up cut up all over, I looked like I got macked on by a vampire, my neck is still bruised!"

Aw, Karkat's gone all curled up on his perch. Awkward little gargoyle.

"Dude," Dave protests, "if he were stupid enough to let his man organs hang out like the rest of us you'd have unmanned him, you totally deserve the bloodsucker snack stamp."

Dave throws a chip at her. Grier is chuckling between his disapproving groans. Burnett calmly snarfs another slice of pizza.

Karkat uncurls when he realizes they're not blaming him, that they're joking around. It was scary as hell when it happened, now it's an occasion to rag on each other about their silly tactical choices while mindfucked by a soul-devouring Class Four.

Rose could talk for hours about the place in the Force of the ritual post-mission mocking of the threat to reduce its credibility and potency, he's sure.

"Most badass bar none was Aguilar. The rest of you guys kept bumbling right back into the barrier and tripping on your own feet -- Maguire I swear to fuck you went and grabbed Karkat by the quills and then you were like, okay, why does it hurt--"

"So that's where the holes came from!" Maguire exclaims.

"--and meanwhile she was busting out karate moves. Seriously, props to you. Good training, good killer instincts, and if you turn out to be Rage I would not be surprised an iota."

(He almost let Damara have her that day. Karkat was in danger and she was in the way.)

"Still, props to you for wanting to deal with demons more closely after that clusterfuck," Burnett says to Welch, who blushes. "Seriously, I would _not_ have been surprised if all of you came back in with notes from your moms saying you couldn't be allowed out to play anymore."

Now Welch is twirling her hair shyly. Pff. "So long as they need manpower, any officer will be tapped for demon hunts regardless, ma'am, I might as well learn how to tackle them properly."

Maguire sighs and flops against the back of his chair. "Yeah, huh, we were pretty useless."

Karkat snorts, flicks his one unbound wing open briefly in annoyance/threat (Dave isn't sure which, but he translates it as "annoyed enough to posture.") "No, the most useless wasn't you, it was Burnett's Asshole of Rage. He wasn't even just useless, he was _actively making things worse_."

Dave groans and lets his head fall into his waiting palm. Burnett stares back at Karkat for a moment and then she raises her whisky in salute. "I plead guilty."

Dave winces some more. Way to bring the mood back down; there's no way she didn't get in trouble for that one.

But then she shrugs, crooks Karkat a smirk. "Bah. If I was too perfect they'd take the division away from Egbert to give it to me, and then I couldn't go in the field anymore," she intones, fake-seriously. "And then Teisat would sulk for the next six years."

"That sounds like a pretty specific number," O'Dell remarks.

"That's when my last kid will hit eighteen." She sighs. "Not too sure what I'll pay him after that."

Karkat lets out a rude noise. He has filched Welch's coke and is sipping it. She pours herself another one without comment.

"Adopt a pregnant cat."

Burnett gives a slow blink. "He says fuck you."

Karkat makes a rude noise right back. "I say he put people under my protection in danger so if I survive being disincarnated he had better pray the first thing I do won't be to come after him."

For a second her skin flickers with weird dark shapes, and huh, Teisat must be hovering right now, the way Latula hangs out in his head for days on end. He wonders how it feels to do that with your perfect match.

Karkat's eyes go narrow and mean and he stares right at her. Or maybe deeper. "No, you shut up when the adults are talking, I get that you're still a brat with the impulse check skills of your average Bard of Breath but that's no excuse to be a fucking moron, you've got guaranteed food for the next several years and you risk your fool head like this?"

" _You_ shut up," Burnett-not-Burnett growls, three octaves lower and rattling like a dying truck. "You're not my summoner."

Dave tries his hardest not to start laughing. But O'Dell and Aguilar crack the fuck up and then he's sporfling into his hand.

" _You're not my mom!_ " Aguilar says in what she thinks is a discreet aside, and the rest of everyone giggle along.

Karkat is bristled up and his eyes glow a bit. Oh lord. Dave knows it's going to offend him even worse but it just makes him snicker harder.

Burnett cracks up, leans back all loose against the back of the couch, whisky dancing in her glass. "Ahaha. Okay, kids, that's enough. I'll send you to your respective corners, don't think I won't. No, Teisat, I won't tell him that. I really won't, stop insisting. No."

Karkat sniffs disdainfully and picks up a slice of pizza, More Mature Than You written all over him. His expression is so completely Kankri that Dave has to excuse himself to the kitchen.

\--

It's getting pretty late in the evening when Burnett brings out the pie she made (pear and apricot) and Dave realizes one of the cokes Karkat filched must have been rum'd up. He realizes because Karkat flops off his perch and goes to swoon adoringly on Burnett's knees, crosses his arms on her lap as he gazes up at her.

He smiles, this heartbreakingly sweet expression, and he tells her very earnestly, "You know, if you won me off him in a duel I might even forget to test the bond completely. Like. If you fed me pie."

She laughs down at him and pats his horn. "I'm not rated for Class Fours but thank you for the offer. My pies are flattered."

"It smells really good. You'd win easily, he's a pushover. It would be a slaughter."

Aguilar, Maguire, and O'Dell obviously find that pretty hilarious. Dave purses his lips very sternly and does not pout.

"Teisat says he would eat your face."

"Teisat can try," Karkat says, and smirks in an almost indulgent way. "Kind of cute that he thinks he could compete."

Aguilar stretches her leg over to nudge him in the shoulder. "Are you getting the d'awws over a little bratty demon, brother, is that what's happening here?"

Karkat frowns up at her, but more thoughtful than annoyed, and shifts so he's slumped against the couch and not Burnett's lap so much. "... Maybe... a bit? I mean he's destructive and short-sighted and ragey all over the place, but if that stopped me I'd never get to meet anyone."

Dave snorts. "He sounds like a minikat when you talk about him like that. Is he one of your spawn, Karkat? You can tell us the truth."

O'Dell makes a weird snort-honking noise and giggles something that sounds like _baby daddy._

Karkat splutters, almost knocks Burnett's hand holding the pie-cutting knife in the air with his sudden flailing. "What? No! He can't be mine, I've _never_ spawned."

He looks so flustered, Dave kind of wants to kiss him.

"I wouldn't anyway." He shudders, pulls his knees against his chest to hug. Okay, make that 'tipsy' into a 'mildly drunk.' "... Give me pie."

Grier and Burnett can tell he's hammered, too. They exchange a speaking look with Dave, a nod. It's getting late, huh.

Once everyone's done eating their pie slice Grier goes, "Okay, I should go home," and the two of them move everyone along with Dave barely having to do anything to kick his guests out.

Karkat shakes hands with people from the floor and doesn't make a move to get up. There's a funny expression on his face that Dave doesn't have time to read; he's walking people to the door, saying his goodbyes. Yeah, it was fun, see you at the station, yeah, okay, later.

Dave settles his arm into his sling comfortably and goes to gather leftovers. There's some pie left, and pizza for breakfast, booyah. He juggles those boxes to the kitchen and ... Karkat is still on the floor, okay. Dave moves the bottles to a corner of the floor; he'll throw the empties away tomorrow, he doesn't want to go back and forth a dozen times tonight.

"Hey, Karkat? How 'bout you go to bed? It's late."

Karkat slowly looks up at him, lips parted, an expression on his face that Dave can't read and which still makes him reach out without a thought.

"I'm _altered_ ," he says, and then his nostrils flare and his eyes widen and ooh, hell no, Dave is not letting him freak out.

He crouches and puts a hand on Karkat's shoulder, tugs him closer, but Karkat grabs his wrist like a vice and repeats, louder, more strident, "I'm _altered!_ I can't _think_ , what the fuck is wrong, I think all _weird_ , this -- this isn't me, there's, it's _wrong_ \--"

God _damn_. "It's just the alcohol, Karkat--"

"I didn't give permission to be altered! I'm fine the way I am, make it stop--"

He really _should_ see about that mild harm thing. "Karkat, you're crushing my wrist."

He bets Karkat didn't even realize, from the way he flinches and lets go, the way all his eyes go round, _oh shit_ on every inch of his face.

Wonder if alcohol might dull a corporeal demon enough that they'd be able to drunkard their way past their contract. Nah, probably not. Better not suggest it though.

"Fuck, fuck. D-- ah -- Master? Make it stop. Tell me -- tell me to be normal again, I don't want to change--"

He's starting to twitch all over, feet kicking and curling, hands fisting. He's going to start pacing and freaking out all over the place in a second.

He _did_ ask Dave to order him. Which, yeah, drunk and all, not really consent, but -- argh, shit, it's nothing bad anyway.

"Karkat, this is an order. _Be still and listen to me_."

Karkat goes still. A bit too much. "You can breathe and blink," Dave says with a groan.

Fuck. Okay, what does he say now.

"Alcohol has a temporary effect. You _know_ that." He waits a second for an answer. Oh right. "... You can move your head." Karkat blinks, eventually. Dave figures he didn't want to nod. "Anyway, tomorrow you'll be back to normal. Okay? You're gonna sleep through it, and then you'll wake up and at worst you'll have a headache for a couple of hours, but we do have drugs for that."

Blink. Blink. Yeah, okay. He picks up a bottle of water from the coffee table, offers it to him. "Here, drink some water, while we're at it."

Karkat doesn't pick it up from his hand. Damn it, he didn't order him that hard, did he? Dave brings the bottle to his mouth; he drinks there at least.

"You'll be just fine tomorrow, I promise. Just sleep on it. Okay, you can speak now."

"I don't like sleeping either," Karkat says quietly, and looks away.

"Huh?"

"I'm not aware of myself for hours on end, that's freaky. I can't control my memory and imagination and my _me,_ and I get psychedelic what the fuckery scenelets that I can't even tell aren't real while I'm in there, it feels like being tenderly loved over by a Witch of Mind. D'you know, they mess with your self while they're eating you, so you can't figure out how to escape."

"Jesus." Dave site beside him, wraps an arm around his back, squeezes as hard as he can. "Why didn't you --"

Tell him. Yeah, tell his master that being a slave has downsides. What could Dave do anyway? Flesh and blood beings have to sleep and dream and that's it.

Karkat gives a dry chuckle, one that doesn't sound all that amused. "I guess it's not too bad. Sometimes. Waste of time though."

"It does work to reset you some, though," Dave says, for lack of a better argument.

"I guess. I'm really not feeling right," he adds, plaintive.

Dave works his fingers into Karkat's messy hair and pets gently at his scalp around the horn. "You'll be fine, bro. Pinky swear, you'll be just fine."

"But it's _changing me_! And then I won't be _me_ anymore, I, _Karkat Vantas_ will be gone and then you'll have. I don't know. Kakatoes Vantas? Cricket Vantas? Words are weird. Why do you guys use noises, why not scents, or, I don't know..."

"Okay, you're more hammered than I thought after all."

"Anyway point is that new demon won't be me and it'll eat you."

Dave keeps petting around his horn, long slow glides, soothing as he can make them. "Dude. Your consciousness is set in flesh right now, it's not floating freely in the ether, yes?"

"Uh. Yeah?"

"Flesh is like... a hard drive? And what's happening to you right now, that's more like..." He looks for something to complete his metaphor, but all his ideas are silly. Oh well, let's go with it. "It's like you're viewing your blog with a different skin. Things look and feel different, but the data hasn't changed. And even if the data _was_ altered, like, someone put in a stupid midi that auto-runs in the background, once the great DDOS attack of evil alcohol stops it just rolls back to a point it wasn't. Your blog is safe."

"Huh." Karkat takes a minute to consider that. Dave rubs his shoulder, in a gesture that probably only comforts him and that Karkat doesn't even notice. "Huh."

"Yeah."

"I want a blog."

"... How 'bout we blog your bedtime, champ."

Karkat gives the kind of thoughtful, considering look from three steps left of reality that is a staple of the drunk guy everywhere. "Yeah, okay. I'm feeling so off, being asleep might be an improvement. Can I move now?"

"--oh, right. Yeah, sure."

Karkat wobbles his way up, leaning hard on the coffee table, and then goes for the ladder.

"Wait a minute, you really should sleep on the couch, the stairs aren't--"

" _No_ ," his pet demon says with clear, diamond-pure certainty. "Upstairs or no dice."

Dave, of course, gives in. Because he's a moron he climbs up after Karkat, one-armed, in case his blade-studded, armored demon stumbles and falls back and needs a flesh cushion to stop him from getting a bruise. (Or his wing broken again, yeah, okay, that's totally worth the risk of getting stabbed through.)

He gets to follow Karkat's ass, so it's not too bad, and eventually after some fruitless heaving and awkward pauses Karkat makes it up to the loft. Dave turns off the living room's lights, leaves only the bedside lamp on, sees about getting undressed.

He dumps his shoes down the ladder. In boxers, he shuffles to his bed. Karkat is half-curled at the head of the mattress, kneading at Dave's pillow and looking vaguely displeased. Dave's a bit of a dick, so he yanks the sheets out from under him and carefully doesn't smile when Karkat lands on his shoulder on the mattress with a bewildered, betrayed look on his face.

"Your nest is like two steps away," Dave remarks pointedly, and tugs on his pillow. It stays stuck under Karkat's unmoving chest.

"Too far." As Dave takes off his shades and puts them safely away, Karkat crawl-flops until he's resting along the length of the mattress, feet toward the head, and tugs the comforter closer. Dave watches him, an eyebrow up. Then he looks up at Dave with a sudden piercing look. "Also if I throw up I want to throw up on you."

... Right. Yeah. Dave supposes this garbage bin will do as an emergency vomit receptacle. He ejects random odds and ends from their plastic bag on the mess of his floor to line it with. Okay, he's ready to deal with Karkat's potential vomit. As ready as he'll ever be.

"You're so suave, I'm swooning here, I'm completely seduced. Mm, talk dirty to me, baby."

He sits on the mattress and reclines, pulling the comforter up his legs; Karkat lurches along with it, lets himself fall across Dave's ribs. Oof.

"I could tell you 'bout my bowel movements and you'd be seduced," he grumbles, eyes half-closed already. His low voice thrums through Dave's body.

"That's a fair point," Dave replies, and turns off the light.

Karkat starts snoring three minutes in; a soft, purring sound that sounds too much like a cat and nothing like any of the three hundred and fifty-three noises Karkat makes in other occasions that Dave has previously catalogued.

He's barely kidding. He doesn't have the exact number; he does have all of Karkat's little noises and gestures catalogued. Photographed, registered, and put up in his mental gallery with playfully informative tags. There's the 'someone dared to be an idiot before me, I have to show them the error of their ways' rattlesnake noise and the 'I am going to have so much fun showing them the error of their ways' cricket-trill-rattlesnake and the 'that was so stupid it was almost endearing except I'm still feeling duty-bound to eat their face', there's the 'it hurts, I want to be out of here' snarl-whine and the 'it hurts, I can't wrap my mind around it, this is positively bewildering and I'd be bewildered if I wasn't in pain' mewl-gasp, and the 'you'd never understand because you're a stupid lowly peon with deficient hardware' gravel-snort and 'you'd never understand because you're my master and I'm your slave' silence.

There's his marshmallow face and his salmon face and his 'oh someone likes me that was unexpected' face. His 'getting the better of Kankri' face and his 'Kankri is getting the better of me!' face and his 'I'm the only one allowed to be an asshole to him' face and...

His furious, glowing-eyed 'I hate you because you're a human turd' face. His disdainful, sneery 'I hate you because you're so lame, are you really the one who's had a computer for years, how did you not know how to do this' face. His small and tired 'I hate you because you trapped me here and I will never be free again' face.

Dave runs a hand down Karkat's back, rubs at shoulder blade plates, brushes against the gaps. Feels him breathe, on Dave's chest and under his hand, like a little metronome, one-two-three-pause, one-two-three.

He's so fucked.

He's fucked, but at least there's leftover pie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh by the way, there's a [Midnight on the Demon Patrol FAQ](http://asukaskerian.tumblr.com/post/42434281075/midnight-on-the-demon-patrol-faq) on tumblr at this here link in case some of you guys want to see it all laid out neatly instead of implied or mentioned once and zipped past. It contains explanations on summoning, ether/the demon plane, partial lists of demon powers and soul names, and other random questions. Spoilery for everything that's been written so far, but not for what happens next.


	20. Chapter 20

Dave deliberately left the drapes open, but Karkat is stubborn, and also Dave's comforter is thick enough to block a lot of light; when Dave starts hearing movement up there it's about eleven in the morning.

"If you're gonna hurl, use the trash can to your left," he calls up to the mezzanine, lazily scrolling down a news article on his laptop.

No answer. Movement ceases. Hm, maybe he wasn't fully awake yet.

Only that does sound a lot like mice, or maybe like Karkat's claws skittering lightly along the wooden floor as he feels around blind.

"Water bottle to your right," Dave adds, eyes on his screen. Oh hey, this article looks funny. Click, into another tab it goes.

Still no answer. Hmm. Maybe he's fallen back asleep and the odd quality to the silence is all in Dave's head.

 _It legit me-certified ain't_ , Latula says, and grins with his mouth. He gives her a quiet chuckle.

Oh well, if Karkat wants to wallow a bit longer, that's fine. Dave just thought he might want a snack before they have to be at Jane's.

Maybe he forgot.

Dave is about to remind him when one of his tabs gets his attention. Looks like his Twitter feed is... huh.

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
 **#FML. MY FIRST EVER HANGOVER. SUCH A GLORIOUS, ALL IMPORTANT MILESTONE.**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
 **I BET HE'S LAUGHING IT UP DOWNSTAIRS. FUCK.**

There are a few offers of sympathy already. Heh, looks like he's got... what, how many followers already? Holy _fuck_ that's about as many as Dave has, and Dave's had his account for several years now. Wow. Should he be jealous?

Nah. Karkat's just that cool. Hee.

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
 **@banginwonder17 NO, IT WAS MY OWN FAULT. I DRANK TWO BEERS AND THEN THE SODA TASTED OFF BUT I DOWNED IT ANYWAYS.**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
 **@banginwonder17 I'M ALL FOR BLAMING THE DOUCHELORD WHENEVER I CAN BUT I WAS THE ONE FILCHING DRINKS, SO.**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
 **ONCE AGAIN THE TRUE ROOT OF MY TORMENT IS MY OWN FUCKING SELF. MY WORST MISTAKE WAS ALWAYS BEING ME. #hungover**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
 **@giga_Fiesta_5437 YOU KIDDING ME I MADE A FOOL OF MYSELF TO SEVERAL PPL + SAID THE STUPIDEST SHIT TO HIM, CAN DO THAT W/OUT DRINKABLE HELP ALREADY #neveragain**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
 **@LoLaLaLa NO, I AM NOT TELLING YOU WHAT I SAID. NO, NOT EVEN BY EMAIL OR IM. THE STUPID WILL DIE WITH ME.**

Ooookay. Ten bucks says he'll tell her eventually.

Well, okay, he might not, but. Just in case.

 **Dave Strider** @turntechGodhead  
 **@cruorGuardian yo bro hows it shakin upstairs and should i like unfollow you for a bit or ??**

"Argh!"

Dave bows his head over his laptop and pinches his lips very firmly. Snerk.

"If it helps I'm not even sure what you're referring to. You said a _lot_ of stuff."

Karkat snarl-crackles at him and lurches out of his blanket cave, drops off the mezzanine onto the floor with a heavy fwump.

The way he stomps off to the kitchen shows he didn't hurt himself somehow. Dave is struck once again by the thought that the dude is crazy resilient. That's very nice.

"Oookay, it _doesn't_ help. Welp."

Karkat is attacking the fridge and doesn't respond. Or... hm, actually.

"What are you looking for?"

"For the love of all you hold holy, shut up!" Karkat growls at him, but it goes into a strange frustrated or maybe pained whine at the end.

"Painkillers are in the bathroom. Respect the dosages, yeah?" he tells Karkat who's stomping out of the kitchen and beelining it to the bathroom already. "Actually you've never been exposed to aspirin so maybe you should go with a half dose--"

" _Stop telling me what I can put in my body!_ " Karkat snarls back, and slams the door closed behind him.

Dave's pretty sure he regrets that the second the slamming noise gets to his ears.

Still, ow. "Dude, when the fuck do I tell you what to put in your body? I'd have dicked you already!"

_Wow, bro. Your brainz sure did make that hellacious jump from point A to point, like, XXX._

Karkat yanks the door open to stare hardcore at him. Umm.

_Woo, staring contest. Ffff. I am so not blinking first._

_Outstanding plan, homeslice. You're gonna have mad fun with that._

"... You tell me what to eat. Sometimes." A pause, disgruntled moue included. "I guess."

"Because when you didn't know what to eat yet you'd have shat out all your water and inner organs if I let you binge. What else am I putting in your body again?"

Karkat's nose wrinkles in annoyed disgust. "Your tongue? Jesus, what the fuck was it even doing there, gross."

Dave puts his laptop on the table safely and leans off the couch, though he doesn't get up yet. "Okay, nope, zinger refused, you didn't even think it was gross at the time. You kissed me back, asshole."

"Maybe I just thought I was too hungry to complain and waste time and _starve_."

Okay, that's. A little bit ouch. Kind of. Yeah. Especially in light of, okay no he's not thinking about that.

He's not sure how to answer; part of him wants to go "okay" and make it a point never to kiss him again, see how he likes it.

But if Karkat didn't mind never kissing again, or worse, was glad, or didn't even _notice_ , Dave would have kind of cut off his nose to spite his face.

He knows Karkat's just feeling bitchy because his head hurts. It's still hella hard to be an adult and not either escalate or flounce.

 _I'm proud of you to the max!_ Latula says. Dave snorts, and pulls his laptop back in.

"We've got lunch with Jane in less than an hour," he reminds Karkat as blandly as possible, and goes back to looking at his endless tabs collection.

\--

The drive goes by quietly. Karkat huddles in the back foot well -- there's more space for him to spread out than in front, Dave supposes. He's looking less stressed out about the ride, Dave thinks, but it's hard to judge when Dave has to use mirrors and stolen glimpses to check.

Well, so long as he doesn't blow chunks.

Jane lives toward the outer edge of town, pretty far from the borderlands and Dave's place, though only fifteen minutes farther out from the station. It's all little town houses that look oddly like her dad's suburban one in miniature, only all squeezed out side by side, without gardens except for a stripe of grass between them and the pavement. Dave's pretty sure that if she had a garden she would have dug out a fish pond long ago.

Dirk's car is in her driveway, so he has to circle around a bit to find a parking spot. Then of course when he opens the door for Karkat and Karkat slinks out (not hopping, must still have that headache) there's a neighbor with their Labrador who freezes on the spot.

Dave and Karkat eye the dog extra closely, just in case it attacks, but it seems to be content to bark vaguely-confused, trying-to-be-dire warnings at them. Dave imagines the dog's inner monologue to go kind of like this: _Is it a person? Is it a monster? It smells like person, but also monster. What??_

Karkat just snorts and turns his back on the two of them. "Where's her house?"

He's exposing his badge; Dave doesn't know if he meant to do that or not, but a few seconds later the neighbor's face unfreezes some and he laughs, nervous. "Oh! Oh, I saw on you TV."

"That's nice," Karkat grumbles.

Dave nudges him in the side, and waves. "Yeah, that's us. Have a good day, sir!" Then he crosses the road because like fuck he is standing here chatting awkwardly and attracting a crowd when lunch is just six houses away.

They're lucky the street is pretty empty of cars at the moment because otherwise by the time they get to Jane's they might well have caused a pile-up.

Dave is reaching for the bell when Karkat knocks with the side of his armored fist, _bang bang bang_ , typical cop about to bust someone. Dave can't help it. He hears Jane's feet shuffling behind the door, and he goes, " _Police! Open the door._ "

She does, fixing him with a flat stare, and then she pulls him into a slightly punishing hug.

No, considering the cuddling aspect of it, make that _super_ punishing. Dave tries to squirm out of her hold, and gets exactly nowhere. "Help, help, I'm being smothered!"

"Maybe you should smother more quietly, buster," Jane counters, and pulls him over the threshold by the neck. "Karkat, do come in. It's nice to see you. Can't say as much for this oaf, but."

Snorting, Karkat follows; she closes the door.

The living room looks straight off the city's public aquarium, like if you go through another door and a corridor painted with cheerful cartoon jellyfish you'll be at the great white sharks' tank. Two walls are nothing but stacked aquariums, the largest ones at the bottom and going narrower as they go up, staggered, so there's still space enough to put in a hand or the feed.

In the middle, right beside the _friggin' pillar aquarium_ there's his brother sitting at the table, but Dave barely notices.

"Whoa. Tell me the truth, is it worse in the other rooms."

"These are only the hardiest fish," Jane says in a longsuffering tone. "The octopus and the cuttlefish are more sensitive to visitors, so they get the second bedroom."

Karkat is staring into a floor-level aqua-terrarium, where a crab wide as Dave's little finger is long is doing a territorial display at him on its little patch of sand, claws raised.

"But how do you not spend your whole day cleaning and feeding these?"

"Who's to say I don't?" she replies tartly, and shoos them to the table. "Sit down, do either of you want a drink?"

Karkat groans, "Fuck no," and then flinches and looks away when both Jane and Dirk look at him, embarrassed.

Dave shrugs, pulls a chair out. "Had people over yesterday, Karkat's got a headache now."

Dirk's eyebrow is up. Welp. "Oho. A morning-after-a-party kind of headache? Is that how you chaperone your kids, Dave."

Dirk is just kidding, sort of, but it does also feel a bit like a rebuke; letting your pet demon get drunk, really?

Also reminds him a bit too much of Karkat's 'stop putting things in my body.' "Dude, far as we know he might be older than the human race on this planet, he can chaperone his own damn self."

He looks away, plays with his glass, pretends Jane hasn't stopped pouring his customary apple juice to arch an eyebrow at him.

It's just, argh.

"Karkat, apple juice? Or I have orange and apple-strawberry."

He pulls out a chair for himself, tentative, and climbs on like he's not entirely sure it's allowed. Dave doesn't like him looking even a little subdued, but it's. He doesn't say anything.

"Strawberry sounds interesting. Uh. Please."

Jane dimples. "Coming right up!"

"Thought you didn't want it," Dirk says. Karkat glares and then makes a show of ignoring him, shoulders hunched. Dave sighs. Wow, this visit is going to be awesome.

Jane pours for Karkat and then sits, turns to him. "How's your wing doing? Do you still feel like the shell is weak?"

Karkat shrugs cautiously, eyeing her over his glass. "Not when I move normally, but I didn't want to stress-test it."

"Hm."

Dave watches her watch Karkat, looking pensive, eyebrows a little furrowed, and then she startles -- just barely, but considering how steady Jane is and how he heard nothing to surprise her, it's a bit weird.

"Huh," she goes, looking a bit baffled, and then "Ah, Feferi wants me to tell you...? She is very flattered you enjoy the crab, as it is one of her favorites, and if you break it she will eat you."

Karkat stares back, an eyebrow up. "Huh, yeah."

"And if you --" She frowns, eyes glazing with the inwards-turned look of one conversing with their demon.

"Just tell us what Feferi wants to say," Dirk says casually, and sips.

Jane sighs. "Apparently it would be just peachy if Karkat were to play with her crab, because you would be providing it, and I quote, environmental enrichment, and that's a fair trade."

Karkat hunches grumpily. "I'll be sure to keep that in mind."

His tone says quite something else. Pff, yeah right. Dave bets the second he thinks they've forgotten about it Karkat will be back to poke at it. He's not sure what's with the fascination, though he admits they're easier to interact with than boring old fish.

"Why do you never let your demons talk, though, really?" he wonders. Jane harrumphs.

"Because it's _weird_! And most of the time there's no reason." Dave eyes her over the rim of his shades, blatantly unconvinced. She huffs. "And I am not about to subject myself to public ridicule by having some pesky demon monkey around with my voice."

"Uh huh." Dave nods, just a bit. "Hey, Damz, you want a turn?"

" _Dave!_ "

"Just kidding. She's not here."

Dirk shoots him a quelling look, and turns to Jane, patient understanding everywhere in his body language, the jerk. "We're not in public, but of course, it's your decision."

"Oh, like you ever let Nepeta or Meulin talk through you!" Jane replies, rolling her eyes.

Dave muffles a snort of amusement in his glass.

There's no warning. "That is furry mean!" Dirk says and _holy shit is he pouting this is the greatest day ever_. "Dirrrk talks with me all the time when we're alone!" And then he sulks into his glass, only to melt back into cool and unconcerned the second Nepeta starts to look a bit too eagerly interested in the taste.

Dave tries to drink to keep from laughing and mostly manages to get it down the wrong pipe and gain a coughing fit.

"What do you loons even chew the fat about?!" Jane demands through her own laughing fit.

Dirk shrugs. "A great many and varied things. Nep is pretty cool, actually. Hey, Karkitty," and it's still him and not Nepeta but pfff, "she's super sad the two of you can't chat without any humans around and also have you eaten any of Kankri yet. She needs to know for personal reasons."

Karkat splutters so hard, wow, there is _history_ there, or a private joke or _something_. "No! What the hell! Like I'd ever poison myself or anyone else with the geyser of _vomit_ from -- what the _hell_ , Nepeta?!"

That smug, satisfied grin on Dirk's sharp-angled face is both unnerving and hilarious and Dave wishes he could snap a picture.

Then she looks at Karkat and waves. "Hi!" and Karkat sighs all longsufferingly, but then he lifts a hand and waves back.

Jane lets out a long, long sigh. "Oh, _fine_."

The change is more subtle on her, because she does grin sometimes and Dirk almost never does. The way her eyes curve up is oddly different, though, and the tilt at the corners of her mouth, and she bares a bit too much teeth.

"Hi Nepfishy!"

Dirk _purrs back_. Creeeeepy.

"So, Karcrab, do you accept the bargain or what? Mister Pinchy needs someone to play with."

Karkat heaves a sigh and pretends to be put-upon. "Oh, fine. But only because I'll be bored as fuck hanging out with these guys, I bet."

She giggles; it's an odd, watery sound, like she's laughing underwater, and it comes up in bubbles and breaks open at the surface. "Damn it, Meenah was right! You're nice."

Karkat splutters. "That is a vicious and filthy lie. She, uh, she told you that?"

Jane's face dimples hardcore. "Yeah! She likes you. I guess that means I have to start hating you now, haha just squidding, even a broken turtle shell can float with the tides twice a day."

Dave exchanges a look with Dirk. It's not every day you get to observe a demon gathering and their interpersonal relations. Interesting.

"You don't like Meenah, then?"

Feferi turns huge iridescent-pink-over-blue eyes on Dirk. "I wouldn't even eat her if I could, I'd just tear her up into bits and leave her for the fishes. I hate her _that much_." A shrug. "But, we're pretty evenly matched, so never mind! How about you and Kankri, Karkat?"

" _Eugh_." He flicks his hand in dismissal. "We can't eat each other, we're contracted, but yeah, pretty much the same. _Gross_."

... He is _so_ fronting in front of the girls, wow. Dave wonders how he'd explain away the cuddles and the trying to help Kankri manage his body.

"Anyways," Karkat goes. "How's your spawn doing?"

Dirk's expression brightens with disturbing suddenness. There's a second his face freezes, like Dirk realizes what the fuck Nepeta is doing with it and is properly noping at that shit, and then he makes himself relax and lets her have it. He still throws Dave a little glare though. Hahaha, gold.

"She's already level three!" Nepeta _squees_. "She tried to bite me the other day!"

Jane-Feferi laughs. "She's so cute. The _cuttle-est_. And and and! She's a Rogue of _Life_ , you know!"

Karkat makes a politely interested noise into his glass. "She sounds very tasty."

" _I know, right?!_ " Jane's face freezes, and her voice changes, pretty much mid-note; "You _eat your own offspring_?!"

Nepeta and Karkat are staring at her. Dave wishes he could take a picture of Dirk tilting his head. "... Sometimes? It's purrty--"

" _Nepeta_. Shut your fucking noise hole!" Karkat glares at her until her wide-eyed look fades from Dirk's face, replaced by Dirk's thoughtful, too-insightful stare. "And _you_ , don't even fucking start."

Dirk mimes locking his own lips. Karkat huffs, eyes narrowed.

"So eating people is good?" Dave muses. "Does that mean all the times you threatened to eat my face you were hitting on me?" Man, he wishes.

The horror on Karkat's face is painfully hilarious. "Wh -- _no!_ "

Jane bites her lip. "I feel I should mention Feferi is laughing. A lot. Also going _reeeeeally_? Pardon, reely."

"What the hell is wrong with you?!" Karkat snarls her way. "That is so fucking gross, all the beer I haven't pissed out is about to come splattering back up in a magnificent display of embodied disgust!"

Wow, haha. Ouch. "I'm flattered."

If Dirk doesn't stop looking at him like that Dave might kick him in the knee.

Karkat shoves himself out of his chair so hard it wobbles, stomps off to the crab tank and sits there, back turned to the lot of them like a little wall.

"Okay," Dirk says. "I think that's enough mediuming for today."

"I reserve the right to throw Damara at you if she ever pops up," Dave replies, but half-heartedly.

They make boring, safe small talk about job stuff and finish their drinks. Then Dirk follows Jane to the kitchen to help. Dave stays seated, watching Karkat watch the crab clambering all over his hands.

Dirk puts plates and cutlery down on the table with a rattling clang. Dave pretends he wasn't started. "There. You set it."

Dave does.

"Karkat, lunch. C'mon."

Karkat's lunch comes with aspirin in a glass, courtesy of Jane. He keeps the grimacing to a subdued minimum when he downs it.

He doesn't look at Dave.

Or anyone, really.

Dave really doesn't mind when Jane turns on the TV for the news.

" _In international news, the supergate of Cairo entered its phase of expansion ahead of schedule, leading to the loss of six cargo ships in the process of crossing the Suez canal from the Red Sea toward the Mediterranean..._ "

"What'd you put in your salad? It's pretty nice."

"Hah! Finish it first, and I'll tell you."

" _...Congress passed legislation to raise the pension of disabled war veterans..._ "

"By the way I need to get my car checked out, lil' bro, you mind lending me yours?"

"How long?"

"Two days, tops."

"Hm. Sure, but let me go shopping first."

" _And in local news, two new victims of demon attacks have been found, presenting symptoms consistent with last month's Terror-Killer, an embodied Class Four Prince of Rage demon that was supposedly killed by the police..."_

Karkat's fork slips out of his hands, falls in his plate with a clang.

"That's _impossible_ ," Dirk says. Jane slaps at his arm without turning to look at him.

" _... Summoner Carl Barrow, alias Crowbar, deceased in the hospital six days ago. The new victims present the same signs of mental confusion and damaged awareness of their surroundings, where they only reliably perceive sources of magic and show no recognition of human faces or voices. Sources at the hospital have confirmed that the damage to their aura was similar to the wounds the previous demon had left..._ "

Dirk is shaking his head, categorical. "That's not fucking possible."

"But are you _sure_ it died," Jane counters. Dirk twitches -- just a tiny little bit behind his shades, she wouldn't see the way his eyelid jumped from that angle but Dave does.

"I guess not," he allows through gritted teeth.

Dave throws his napkin on the table in disgust. "You guess not? His meat costume died. That -- that _presence_ , the fuck it was, who knows what it even did?"

Jane and Dirk are staring at him.

"The time-fucker? When Kurloz died? Anyway, signs point to there was another summoner around, and in the hospital Bro's puppet said another Prince of Time--"

"No," Karkat interrupts. He's staring down into his plate, brows knit, jaw set. His claws click a decrescendo on the table. "Power level like that? Only two demons it could be, and you say this one was Time."

He looks up at Dave, eyes heavy-lidded with cynicism.

"Tell me you know anyone with the power to pull _their_ strings."

... Fuck.

(Karkat seems to think he should know what he's talking about. Why would he...?)

A demon this powerful, acting in the mortal world independently. Jesus fucking all his apostles and Mary Magdalene on top. With a little Pontius Pilate sprinkled in for variety. That kind of fuck.

(Why would he know. Something tickles at his mind, something important, but it feels of dragon scales and razor-edged wings. He shies away from it.)

"I gotta call Jade."

Jane blinks at him. "Why do you--"

"Just. Hunch. I dunno."

Why is it even nosing around this plane. Why is it, it was the borderlands that day, not the gate itself, how could something so massive come so close to crossing over? Without a summoning circle it should have beached itself long before brushing the physical plane.

' _There has been a lot of activity with the hell gate today,_ ' Captain Egbert had said that day, just before it all went to shit.

There's nothing pointing to something catastrophic for sure but all the hair on his arms is up; his nape prickles.

"Jane, heal me." He kneads his shoulder. It still aches, his articulation is still too weak. "I'm the only one who's fought that demon before who has a Knight of Mind. I need to--"

Jane throws her napkin down, glares at him. "Even if I _would_ heal you, Dave, I still couldn't heal Karkat! Are you planning to go alone, or to drag him into that mess with you?"

 _Shit_.

He looks at Karkat, without meaning to. Karkat looks startled, upper eyes a little too wide, betraying -- nerves, fear?

"I can bandage my wings down," he says staunchly. "He doesn't need to go alone."

Jane throws him an exasperated look. "I can't condone this--"

"You use your wings to build momentum when you run to reach a sustainable gallop instead of an awkward trot, and as counterweights for quick turns," Dirk says, voice cold, empty of all but the facts, "and as auxiliary weapons to protect yourself from enemies closing in from the back. Fighting with them bandaged would hobble you. Not to mention the bandages will be an obvious target. Do you really want to go into another fight like the last one in that state? Dave?"

"... _Godfuckingdamnit_."

Dave rakes a hand through his hair. He knew that. He knew, he just. He hasn't seen Karkat run in the apartment, there's no space, but it's true that his slower gaits _suck_ , and he can't -- he can't really run right if he can't move his wings. He'd be a sitting duck.

"Okay. Jesus. Fuckin' _okay_."

"I can fight!" Karkat snarls back. "We know what to expect this time, we know how to stop the mindfucks cold from the start--"

"Karkat," Dave says, just that, and Karkat stares at him, betrayal all over his face. It hurts to swallow. "If we get the order to go -- we'll go. But in the meantime, just..."

He makes himself breathe out a long sigh. On the TV the news are long over; there's an ad for cat litter.

"Just heal up, okay?"

Karkat sinks slowly back into his chair, staring at him like Dave betrayed him. Dave closes his eyes and slumps, forehead in his hand. Fuck, he wants to go.

Beside them Jane and Dirk are also sitting quiet, thinking.

"It can't be Kurloz," Dirk declares, and pushes away from the table without warning. "Jane, sorry, I've got to jet. Things to check out. See you for patrol."

He stalks past Dave's chair and Dave watches him, wondering at the steel in his spine and the banked anger in his heel strikes.

"Later, bro?" he calls out after him. Dirk waves a hand without turning back and then he's gone. The door closes behind him a second later.

Jane sighs. "Will you two at least be finishing lunch before you rush off?"

Bluh.

Dave might still be hungry, at that. Besides feeding Karkat is something he's not too proud to accept help for. He needs to eat healthy homemade stuff sometimes too, if only so he'll know what to bitch Dave out about next time they go for cheap Chinese.

Karkat is still glowering quietly at nothing, disappointed and sour. Dave gives in.

"Yeah, sure. Captain's probably still lunching anyway, we won't be talking him into asking for us by interrupting his risotto."

Karkat's spine uncrooks with an almost audible twang. Jane groans.

"I should have dang well known. Did everything we said--"

Dave raises his hands defensively. "Hey, I ain't gonna push it. If the Captain says no, he says no. But if there's some way to make sure no one gets brainfucked, hey, we'll just ask for bodyguards before we wade in, that's all."

Karkat's eyes are bright once again. Knight to the tip of his claws. Dave kind of wants to smush his cheeks.

Jane looks like she's thinking closer to a noogie. "... Just eat your lunch."

Dave picks up his fork obediently, trying not to smile. Karkat is already devouring, so fast he's probably not tasting any of it.

Jane shakes her head slowly, despairing. "If he says yes, I'll heal you. _If_ he says yes!"

"You're my favorite," Dave assures her, and digs in.

Fuck, it's tasty. Good thing Dirk left his portion behind.

\--

"Are you, or are you _not_ on _sick leave_ , gentlemen."

\--

"It's _stupid_."

"Mmh."

" _That_ is our boss?! The concern is so misguided and the planning so short-sighted you fucking wonder how he ever sees anything but the back of his own skull, upon which are written in letters of fire, This Is Stupid!"

"Uh huh."

"Did he one day moronically sit in the wrong boss chair and his miasma of retardation was so potent no one realized they'd let a pickle-brained hobo off the streets in?"

Dave sighs. "I agree with you, buddy." Okay, not about the hobo thing. Quite. "What do you want me to do about it? Snap my fingers and make a wish? Without the right circle it won't do much, and I kind of suck at making 'em up on the fly."

Karkat glares at him in the rearview mirror and sinks back into the legspace.

And now he doesn't know what to do with the rest of afternoon except maybe go buy Karkat a cell phone of his own, the way he's been promising for weeks, but once that's done Karkat will burrow in it and not come back out until it's time for dinner.

How did Dave spend his days before Karkat was there to entertain him, he wonders?

Oh, right, he did overtime.

"Isn't that Harley?" Karkat says, head popping back up to stare through the window. Dave throws a glance that way. "What the fuck is that with her? Is it a polar bear? Why does she have a polar bear, is that someone's price, what the fuck. Bleached tiger? Class One?"

Snorting, Dave slips into a convenient parking spot before someone steals it, and whistles at his partner through the window.

"Jade! Hey."

Her fur monster drags her over, white fluffy tail wagging in interest. "Oh! Hey guys, what are you doing here?"

Dave comes out of the car. "Eh, driving around? We dropped in to see the boss, but he wasn't interested in letting us in on the investi--"

"I am _not_ giving you info, don't even ask, buddy."

"... gation. I wasn't asking," Dave protests. "Wow, such trust. I can feel the partnership forged in steel there, Harley. I would not hesitate one second to let myself fall back into your waiting arms. ... Karkat, I can't lock the car if you're _in_ the car."

Karkat is crouching on the back seat, eyes huge, all bristles up. Even his hair looks poofier.

" _What the almighty thunderfuck_."

Jade laughs, pats her dog's fur, and he turns his muzzle up at her with a doggy grin, tongue lolling. "That's my dog! His name's Bec."

" _It's a Class Four,_ " Karkat hisses back, horrified.

"So are you," Dave points out.

"It's a _higher_ _Class Four_. Motherfuck. Why did you ever need me, you son of a macaque with delusions of sentience, this is _a fucking Class Four_."

"Yeah," Jade retorts, rolling her eyes, "and he thinks he's a dog!"

Karkat blinks. Bec puts his nose in the window to check him out, tongue still lolling. Karkat crackle-hisses at him, somehow bristling farther; after a few seconds where nothing happens he deflates, brows knitting in confusion. Worry?

"Uh. Do you speak?"

Bec keeps panting; a second later his ears flick and he looks down the street after a cat's mewl.

"He thinks like a dog, Karkat," Jade repeats, nicer. "Biologically and neurologically speaking, he's a dog. With a high magical charge, but the next door lady dog had an adorable litter by him and they were all perfectly normal puppies. They weren't even magic."

"... Seriously? How the fuck did that happen."

Jade shrugs expansively. "Dunno! I think he phased through the fence when the mom was in heat, you had best believe I got an earful when the puppies were born and half of them were white."

Dave snorts as Karkat glares, and crawls closer to the window so he doesn't have to crane his neck so much to communicate his disdain. "Not the puppies, who the fuck cares about hell-puppies! How'd you put a demon into a dog?! Because there's no way that's its original body, it's got to be a possession, but how the hell do you get a demon to move into a _dog brain_?"

Jade shrugs, and tugs on the leash to give the car door space to open. "Not a clue! It wasn't me."

Karkat freezes in the middle of pushing the door open. Dave sticks his hands in his pockets, entertained to the max.

"You mean _it's not even properly bound_." He looks like he's about to hyperventilate. "Sweet holy bitch-shit, it's _not bound_."

"Not... really? It's not like he can give his Name in this state. I've got some spells just in case but they wouldn't--"

" _Are you fucking crazy?!_ "

Welp, the Karkat is out of the car. Also in Jade's face, legs extended and back arched to compensate for the set of his hips as much as he can. People are slowing down to watch.

Also Bec has turned his head to stare, and his ears are starting to move into configurations Dave doesn't like much. He taps Karkat's shoulder, makes shooing gestures to get him away from the door, so he can close it.

"Are you fucking serious, she's--"

"Okay, Karkat, it's adorbs that you'd be Knighting at Jade like that but she's had that devilbeast for years and the only evil thing it ever did was to shed all over my best fancy suits."

Jade pats Bec's flank, ruffles his fur. Bec leans against her leg and looks delighted. "Yeah, seriously, stop fretting. I asked Rose to check, and she asked Terezi to look into his head, and seriously, he's a dog. A dog with powers, but, yeah." She sobers up a little, caresses her dog's head. "I guess the demon he was before is just plain gone. Which, you know, isn't a big surprise, because a dog brain isn't really made for complicated consciousness."

Karkat tries to hide a shudder. There's horrified compassion all over his face. Dave awkwardly pats his shoulder and closes the car door behind him, locks it.

"But anyway, where were you going?"

"Dog park. Coming?"

He exchanges a look with Jade, glances meaningfully at the people passing them in the street. Jade knows the area better, she'll know if it's risky for Karkat to walk around here. Near the police station or around his place it's fine, they're getting used to him, and at Jane's they didn't stay outside long...

Jade nods and throws him a wink. Dave strokes his chin. "Yeah, okay. Not like we've got better things to do."

"Excuse you, _I_ have better things to do."

"Twitter will still be there when you come back. C'mon."

It's a bit hard to get there when Karkat keeps trying to put Dave between him and the dog. Which is a problem for Dave because he was trying to put Karkat between him and the dog!

"It's not even a dog," Karkat hisses up at him.

Dave leans down to hiss back, "I don't care it's not a dog, Vantas, it has dog teeth, that's good enough for me."

Karkat gives him the stinkeye. "I have teeth too."

Dave tries not to reply 'yes but yours are sexy' because Jade would never let him live it down. (Objectively they're not sexy. They're terrifying, Karkat looks like a mini shark. So cute. Dave sometimes entertains guilty thoughts of the day he can afford another bite.)

It's the beginning of the afternoon; the people here are mostly moms with their too-young-for-school kids, and old people. A lot of old people. Dave supposes the dog park isn't awesome for kids to range freely, considering the feces issue.

Jade unclips Bec's leash -- a polite fiction, that thing is barely a string and, oh, yeah, the 'teleporting himself out of his collar if he wanted' thing. He trots off, nose to the ground and tail up. Jade waves at a few people.

Dave follows, hands in his pockets, and counts the double-takes as people notice that the creature at his heels is _hella_ not a dog.

Someone's Yorkie tries to sniff Karkat's butt. Dave almost gives himself a hernia trying not to laugh.

"We've been here two minutes and I already want out," Karkat says, and leaps onto a bench six or seven feet away like a frog. The dog goes into a frenzy of barking and tries to give chase. Karkat perches on the back of the bench and glowers sullenly at the Yorkie.

Hands in his pockets, Dave ambles to the bench and sits under him, keeping the dog away with a careful foot until it gets bored of treeing Karkat and wanders off with a vindicated sniff. Karkat stays perched on the back of the bench, though he leans some of his weight on Dave's shoulder for balance.

Jade sits, leans her elbows on her knees. Dave tugs her shirt down a little so the gun harness underneath will stop showing so much; she grunts in absent thanks. They spend a few minutes watching the scenery, lazily tracking dog-perps, and breathing in the slight decrease in car exhaust afforded by the line of bushes along the fence.

"E-excuse me, that is _not_ a dog and--"

"Neither is your crotch-dropping there and you don't see me trying to kick you out. Oh, sorry, _is_ it a dog? I can see it now."

Dave is a very bad demon handler, because he just presses his lips together and slouches into his seat, legs stretched out over the gravel. Jade is trying to muffle laughter in her hand.

Poor grandpa with his grandkid looks halfway between scandalized and traumatized. "I -- I was just--"

"Trying to uphold the law of the dog park that says no other pets allowed, but see, I'm not a pet, now you know better, the law was upheld, bye. If your dog tries to sniff my ass I'm going to kick it, by the way." He flexes his raptor murdertoes.

The old man hauls his dog and his toddler in and huffs out. Dave waits until he's out of earshot and lets himself snort.

"Does this happen often?" Jade asks.

"More than if you didn't take me to places like this," Karkat replies acerbically, and flicks his spines up and down so they rattle in annoyance.

Thirty seconds later Dave's phone buzzes. Dave checks the call -- station, huh -- and answers.

" _Hey, Strider, you the one hanging out with an embodied demon at West End Dog Park?_ "

Pff. "Yeah, Dispatch, that's us. If you send a patrol car anyways, ask them to bring us beer."

" _You wish. Any disturbance?_ "

"Apart from Karkat getting treed by a Yorkshire Terrier to avoid getting his ass sniffed--"

Karkat splutters and shoves at his shoulder. "Hey!"

"--we're fine."

The cop at the other end of the line laughs. " _Okay, all I needed to know. Over and out._ "

Karkat growls, and puts a bit more of his weight on Dave's head when he hunkers down sulkily.

"Why are we even here, you assholes aren't even talking."

"Partnership bonding," Jade replies, voice lazy, and Dave follows up with "Synergy enhancement. Haven't hung out in a while, is all."

Also he still has his hunch to mention, but out of context it's a bit, hrrm, how to even bring it up. Random.

"Yeah, you spend all your free time hanging out with Karkat! Not that I mind, and it's not like you could take him to our bar after work, but..." she turns to give Karkat an apologetic smile. "It's nice to hang out for a bit, is all. Bec won't be too long, don't worry."

Karkat grumbles under his breath, but simmers down.

Barking dogs and the wind in the leaves and _sunlight_ , it's nice. Better not enjoy it too long or he might fry, but this is hardly summer sunlight yet; he'll be fine for a while.

He likes the way Karkat's quills and his hair brush against the nape of his neck. The front of Karkat's shoulder is pressed on top of Dave's to steady him and he's warm even through the shell.

"Excuse me... Are you Detective-Summoner Strider? And, ah -- Knight Vantas?"

Jesus dick. The young woman who stands before them is -- bottle blonde, conventionally pretty, well-dressed. She has no dog, but has that eager light in her eyes, and a fucking _recorder in her hand_. "No interviews," he groans, and wishes he could ooze farther down his seat without sloping straight off the bench and onto the ground.

At least she doesn't have a cameraman with her. This might not escalate into a feeding frenzy.

"Can you take a moment to comment on the new attacks? Ms. -- ah, Detective-Summoner Harley, nice to meet you, I'm Lucy Standish with the Pilgrim, would any of you care to comment?"

"No comment," Jade replies tiredly, and looks around for her dog.

The journalist is going to insist -- she's a journalist, it's what they do. Dave sits up straight. Karkat has long since straightened up, so he doesn't have to be careful of unbalancing him, and Dave resents her a little for ending that moment for him. "We're on sick leave, we're most decidedly not on it. Can't give you info we don't have, miss."

"But surely you wouldn't object to giving more background information about the... _previous_ terror-killer, would you? To give our readers a better understanding of the danger --"

"No comment," Dave repeats. "Also, no comment. Because we are not commenting. Watch all that commenting we're not getting up to. This is a zero comment zone, please fasten your seatbelts and put your recorders back in the box."

"Were you pulled from the case for disciplinary reasons?"

Karkat unfolds like a spring, snarling, from demon loaf to threat display in a flash. He doesn't make a move to get off the bench; Dave's arm slowly goes back down. Ow, shoulder.

"We're _injured_ , you heinous bitch! Do you think I wear bandages as a fashion _fucking_ statement?"

"Karkat," Jade says tiredly. "Don't--"

"So the demon is a severe physical threat in addition to a mental threat?"

Dave sighs. He's gonna get reamed for letting Karkat say that much, depending on how much spin she puts on it. "No comment. Karkat, you want to stop playing into her hands, feel free to start any second now."

Karkat splutters down at him. "I wasn't -- oh, fuck you."

Other dog park users are staring at them. Well, not that they weren't already but before that it was nervous, should I get away, and now it's intrigued _ooh is this going to be on TV I am SO telling everyone I was there_.

"Are the wounds in question the same ones that kept you in a medical coma for two weeks?"

Blargh. "Come on, you only spent five minutes on your homework, didn't you, that's lazy." The coma was magical exhaustion, that's not a wound. "C minus for effort, and a C on How Many Leading Questions Can I Stuff Into An Interview."

The journalist represses a smile, and then lets herself laugh, a little chagrined, and damn it, Dave knows it's got to be a defusing trick but he finds himself tick down two notches on the hostile scale on pure instinct.

"Alright, alright. Not even a comment on the length of your sick leave?"

"Nnnnnope."

A smile on her lips, Jade is pretending to be elsewhere, the traitor. Partner synergy his hot ass.

"Isn't this when you _leave_ ," Karkat says, giving her the stink-eye, and slinks off the back of the bench to the seat. Dave shuffles to the side to give him space to turn and sit between him and Jade, since if he wanted to keep going to the ground he'd be down there already.

The journalist is staring back at him and she might be a little nervous, but she's way more excited than afraid, behind the thin veneer of professionalism. "Actually, I wanted to ask the two of you whether you'd agree to a human interest piece? You haven't given any interviews yet, and the last press release from the police wasn't extremely informative, people are very curious about Karkat!"

"People have Twitter," Karkat replies. "People are curious why people don't know about Twitter, in a field where you'd assume they know the basics of how to use a keyboard. Why does everybody talk around me like I'm a strangely fleshy conversation piece?"

Jade snorts and bumps her shoulder into Karkat's, sending him into Dave's. Ow a bit, but he doesn't mind much. Karkat keeps leaning against him as he turns to glare at Jade.

"My apologies. I did find your Twitter, though I haven't had time to read yet--"

"Right. Shoot me a message when you do. Not before. I don't like to repeat myself."

That's a filthy lie. Karkat will hold forth for hours on everything disagreeable about Dave's face, personality, and existence, and there have damn well been repeats, he has faults aplenty but that'd make him Satan or something.

Oh, she looks all happy, like she thinks she found a fault line. "Alright! I will." Like he's not gonna have to go to PR with Karkat to ask for the list of dos and don'ts before they can tell her the time of day.

Jade clears her throat. "And what kind of questions would you be asking for your human interest piece?"

"Oh..." The journalist looks briefly lost. "Things like, how are the two of you getting along? Karkat, how are you enjoying this plane--"

" _Not_ ," Karkat snarks.

Dave goes "Marshmallows" under his breath. Karkat side-eyes him meanly.

The journalist chuckles obligingly at their shenanigans. "How you're getting integrated with Detective Strider's colleagues, what a typical day is like..."

"Huh. People are interested in that stuff? No, disregard that, I've watched TV, I just don't get why."

"But you would have no objection to answering?"

Karkat shrugs. "Who the hell cares what a bunch of meat monkeys think of me, really."

"There might be some questions about the demon world maybe, your personal expression of magic, what Blood does--"

Karkat bursts out laughing, the horrible little gremlin. It's not half-hearted; he ends up clutching his ribs, rocking back against the back of the bench. Jade is snorfling like there's an army of fire ants in her sinuses.

Dave himself _might_ be chuckling a little. Dejectedly so.

"Yeah, if he ever lets it slip to you, I want to hear it in the next five seconds. Good luck, my heart and prayers go with you, etcetera."

She grins, all delight and eagerness. Ugh. Someone save him from enthusiastic people. "I see. Note made!"

Bec comes back, and immediately starts sniffing the journalist from up close and personal. Jade gets up to catch his collar; Karkat stretches, hops off the bench, and Dave takes it as an excuse to get up as well. "Okay, if your fur monster is all out of pee we should get back." A polite-but-firm nod. "Ms. Standish."

He's taken two steps before he pauses, looks over his shoulder.

"How did you find us, by the way?"

Because, yeah, unless she bugged Dispatch or his phone...

She blinks back at him, surprised, a hand still in her pocket to put away her recorder. "Oh, I set up a Google alert for Karkat sightings."

... _Groan_. Damn it, technology.

He follows after Jade and Karkat, already gone and trotting ahead.

He almost wants to tag along with Jade for the rest of her day -- used to do that, laze around on her couch, drink her beer, spin some beats on her best computer.

Karkat doesn't really fit in that dynamic, though. Not yet, maybe never. Third wheeling it isn't fun at all, especially when he has no choice about it.

"Okay, let's go get you that smartphone," he says. Karkat perks right up.

He opens the car for Karkat, and then he calls Jade closer because it's now or never, and he blurts out, "I think," and then he doesn't know how to finish. "Something about this affair. And the Time demon that... ate Kurloz or something. It's on the tip of my tongue, but I--"

Inside his mind he runs into hard, cold silver scales.

 _Nopeo, flameo_ , Latula says. _My bad, I know it's mad trippy but you don't need to think about that yet._

What the _fuck_.

_Hey, I agree it's the squarest thing ever but I'm under orders here. You'll know it when you see it. Or hear it, Iunno._

_Whose orders?_

She gives him a mental eyeroll. _Yo, lamebrain, who am I contracted with to prevent external tampering these days?_

_\-- oh._

"Dave?"

"I. You know." Fuck.

A hand on her dog's head, Jade stares at him without a word, and then she nods.

"The coincidence is pinging you weird too, huh?"

Relief almost sends him flopping onto his ass on his car's hood. He grunts, gives a slow, reluctant nod.

"I was just saying, you know. Keep your eyes peeled. Wouldn't want my partner walking into that shit with her peepers less than fully open."

"You know," Jade replies through a giggle, "what's funniest is _you're_ the one saying this to _me_."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Dave protests, but she's already walking off with a wave and a laugh.

"Will you get into the fucking car already, or do I have to steal it from under you and get my own ass to the phone shop? There isn't that much traffic, I bet I could get pretty far before someone T-bones me and I have to ditch it."

Dave pretends he's not hurrying as he goes around to the driver's side. "Bro, I'm the one with the credit card."

"Why do you think I'm not already there?"

This time when Dave drives off Karkat puts his head between the seats to watch.

\--

Dave dreams.

He wakes up and forgets his dream the instant his eyes open, but he turns on his laptop and doesn't go back to sleep.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Pool Episode. u.u;

"Is that a house, or a castle?"

Dave snorts as he gets out of the car. "Castles are prettier. This is a pile of giant cement pizza boxes, dude." The pile isn't even straight and even, there are corners sticking out everywhere.

Dirk doesn't crack a smile or even indicate that he heard as he extracts himself from the passenger's seat, even though he was the one who first made that comparison, ten or fifteen years ago. He's been monosyllabic ever since they picked him up for mandatory Strilonde Bonding Time on pain of Aunt Romy.

Crouched beside Dave on the driveway, Karkat is still staring up doubtfully.

"Besides," Dave continues, "it's not that big, just kinda sprawly."

"There's a _tower_."

"It's an observatory!" Roxy calls out from the other side of the bridge, and waves. Dave vaguely wonders how she heard them so well, with the little running stream between them and the waterfall just behind the corner where she's standing, but he sticks his hands in his pockets and follows Dirk.

"Oh, an _observatory!_ " Karkat replies, sarcastic, as he makes his cautious way across. "Whew. Totally different! Especially the pompous levels."

Roxy snickers into her hand. Karkat stalks along, annoyed and making damn sure, Dave notices, to walk in the exact middle of the not-so-narrow bridge. Pff.

Yeah, okay, the railing is a single bar of metal that stands waist-high on Dave, which means it's useless to him as protection against falls, and probably the iron content itches at him a bit.

"Uh, you're okay with running water, right?" he thinks to check once they're about halfway across. Usually it's the more vampiric types that'll have issues with crossing those, and he doesn't think Karkat fits the criteria, but hey, what does he know about Blood types.

Karkat stares deadpan at him for a few seconds, and then goes, "You're aware the only reason I don't trip you overboard is you're carrying my cell phone, right?"

"Uh huh."

Roxy hugs Dirk, who hugs back with a weary sigh, and then Dave. She hangs from his neck until he goes oof, and then she falls into a crouch and grins right into Karkat's face, arms open, fingers wriggling. "Hug?"

"Does 'pincushion' mean anything to you?"

"Aw, we could be careful."

"Where do you see a 'we' here? Tell me, I'm interested."

Dave lets them bicker as he ambles around the corner of the house toward the front door. Dirk hasn't gone in yet; he's standing to the side of the entrance, watching the scenery.

Dave has to admit he way the forest unrolls under them past the waterfall is always pretty nice, but he has photos of it enough to bury someone with, auroras in the snow and high summer evenings, and a borderline literal shit-ton of pretty similar days to today's nice spring weather, and also his brother thinks he's the only one being bummed to hell and back about the Kurloz case and is in a Hang Out At Your Risks And Perils mood, so.

He pushes the front door open and walks in. "Hi, aunty--"

A slash of bright blade. He ducks, barely, rolls forward farther into the house instead of back (behind him there's only the drop and the waterfall; bad plan.)

There's a katana abandoned on the stairs, right besides Rose who's sitting on the marble steps with her knees together, chin in her hands. He rushes for it, ducking on instinct and habit as another swipe cuts the air next to his arm.

And then red erupts behind him.

Something crumbles, hits the floor. He fetches up against the steps, ass bruised from turning even as he grabbed for the sword and tripping, in time to see part of the trailing sleeve of Zazzerpan the Learned fall to the floor in pieces, the resulting rubble rolling around Bro's feet.

Karkat is bristling with thorns of blood; his teeth are bared to the gums. Holy fucking shit --

Dave yells "No!" too late; the attack is already thrown, fast as blinking.

Bro disappears; reappears on the stairs behind Rose. Lil Cal is sitting on his shoulder.

Dave grabs for his Name. "Karkat, _stop_ , what the fuck!"

Bristling all over, Karkat goes statue-still in the doorstep. Behind him Roxy is staring with one hand on her mouth, the other one on where she's not carrying her gun today.

There was a very short moment where vision persistence meant Bro's afterimage was speared right through the sternum. Dave's heart is still running kind of fast about it.

He gets up, legs a bit shaky. Rose stays seated.

"I wasn't trying to hurt him, Karkat," Bro says, oddly quiet and nice about it. "It's just something we do for training. Family tradition, yeah? Cal's under orders to get him out of the way if he can't dodge on his own."

... Cal would? Wow, that's. Huh. He throws Dirk a glance, eyebrows furrowed; Dirk's eyebrow is quirked up like he's surprised that Dave -- urgh, it's the "can't believe you hadn't guessed already" face. Okay, so that's a pretty nice chunk of "don't think about the implications Bro was a great Bro okay shut up" of his childhood made baseless, actually. (Son of a bitch could have _told_ him! Either of them, Jesus.)

Right. Yeah. "You can move," Dave tells Karkat, and runs a hand up his forehead and into his hair. Wow, adrenaline, long time no see, I missed you. "Yeah, he's not -- dude, he's my _bro_ , why the hell would he seriously want to kill me?"

Okay, it went by a bit fast for Karkat to think it through. Okay. And it's not like Dave has been hanging out with his pseudo-paternal figure since he got Karkat, or even for a while before that, he's an adult with a job now and Bro has his own life to lead. Karkat hadn't really had the chance to see what was normal for them.

And Dave is maybe kind of annoyed at that Strider tradition of sudden death from the shadows, if he wants to be super-honest. Even a heads-up à la "I'm gonna attack you sometime today, keep your guard up" would be better than this utter randomness. His job makes him paranoid enough without adding to it; hypervigilance is not actually a good trait to cultivate long-term.

Karkat is staring at him like what he just said made no sense and was really stupid to boot. "He _attacked you_ , why the fuck was I supposed to guess he didn't mean it because, I don't even fucking get why?! Because he's your fake replacement genitor?! So what?"

Someone coughs delicately to Dave's left. Whoa, Kankri was sitting on the couch over there and Dave completely missed him. The dude is hardly discreet with his huge red sails, how'd that happen?

"Mammals do things, ah, differently, Karkat, if you will remember. Though indeed, even so, abuse and maladapted child rearing practices still happen," he adds with a pointed look at Bro, who snorts and sheathes his katana.

For a second Dave almost sticks his into his belt because who the fuck knows when Bro will pounce again, and then he thinks, _no, fuck it, this is a weekend I am resting and I'm old enough to opt the fuck out anyway_.

He doesn't say it, though. He doesn't know if he wants to snap at Bro for his being a random asshole routine or at Karkat for almost killing his bro. Better keep that shit on lockdown. He drops the katana on the stairs and turns and looks for Rose's mom.

He finds her in the kitchen corner; he sticks his hands deep in his pockets and slouches his way there.

"Yo auntie."

"I told you not to call me that, you brat, it adds like thirty years to my age."

Dave should be bantering back here, but he can't be bothered. "Whatcha drinking? No, doesn't matter, I'll have one of whatever it is if'n you don't mind."

She laughs, full-throated, and pours him one without putting down her own glass for even one second. "Yiss! Let's be lushes together."

"You're taking medication," Karkat reminds him from the doorway, a scowl in his voice.

Dave grumble-growls, and makes grabbing motions at the glass that Rose's mom has stopped pouring. "Don't care, gimme."

She raises her eyebrows in a mildly doubtful way, but when Dave scowls at her too, she puts the glass on the counter and slides it to him.

Off to the left, Rose clears her throat pointedly. "Dave, if I quit drinking just to watch you team up with Mother..."

"I swear to fuck the next person who tries to guilt me out of this here beverage will end up in the pool, fully dressed."

He downs a third of it in one go. Ghh, burns. What the fuck ever.

\--

Two hours later he's in the pool, though at least he's not fully dressed.

Well, okay, his feet are hanging in the water, pants rolled up to the knees.

It's tradition that whenever the Strider-Lalondes convene at Lalonde Senior's hugeass house for Sunday lunch that they don't get to leave before they've had dinner as well, and probably have also wasted half the night blathering "just another half-hour before I go." It's a pretty long trip not to get the most out of it. So while they're here they have to find actual stuff to do.

It's pretty warm for spring, but the air still has some bite; thankfully the pool is covered. It was built in the basement of the house, sharing a long glass wall with the raging river.

When they were kids he remembers Dirk asking about the structural soundness of the house. Aunt Romy told him she'd gotten a demon to make the calculations for her, and another to ward off catastrophic accidents. Said -- he remembers this oddly clearly -- she'd "still be fucked in case of earthquake, but who isn't."

Dirk accepted it without question, but then again he's always had an easier time trusting demons than humans. Something about the absolute if-then of properly done contracts, Dave supposes...

"... Not sure what crawled up their Striderian asses to _rot_ there, but..."

"Yo sis, yo cuz, my ears are still in fine working order, if y'all were wonderin'." Dave doesn't bother turning around to glare at Roxy and Rose, stays sitting with his shoulders slumped. He's watching Karkat waddling on the steps at the shallow end, his dubious face on.

"We were not, actually, despite the way you've played deaf to the conversation for the last half-hour, but thank you for the confirmation," Rose replies tartly. "Now there's no mystery what's up with you, you've always been a horrible patient, but do you know what's wrong with Dirk?"

Dave shrugs, frowns a little. Dirk was pretty quiet all through lunch and afterwards before Aunt Romy got him into a theoretical demonology discussion, but Dave was too busy glowering at his own glass to notice much. "Apart from being ordered to take a day off in the middle of a case? Meh. Ask Kankri?"

Kankri, who has also been uncharacteristically quiet and distracted so far, though at least not in an asshole way, looks up from his study of the bubbles. "Why, that suggestion is--"

"Most certainly not," Rose interrupts. "That would be invasion of privacy. He's family, not a perp, it would be extremely unethical."

Dave cranes his neck to quirk her a doubtful look. "So, you would if Kankri could, but he can't, so it's okay because it would have been naughty."

Rose fixes him with a narrow-eyed glare, and then sighs, looking morose. "It really _would_ be unethical."

"Guessing's more fun anyway, Rosie," Roxy tells her, and nudges her shoulder. Kankri huffs.

"May I say my piece without being interrupted now? I could find out a great deal of things about Detective Strider the elder; none of them would be his emotional situation, though extrapolation from other data is a possibility."

Rose groans quietly. "Oh, don't tempt me. You're fed well enough as it is. You don't need a snack."

Kankri manages to look virtuously offended and disappointed at the same time.

Bleh.

Aunt Romy will manage to drag Dirk to the pool in probably another hour, if they're still hanging out here by then. Which seems likely. Dave doesn't see the girls relinquishing the hot tub anytime soon, and Kankri seems thoroughly distracted by it as well in a way that means he's not even protesting it any longer. (And he'd had a hell of a lot to say about the bubbles on his wing membranes earlier, holy shit.) Nah, they're probably staying in here until someone drags them out.

Splash! Dave turns to look for Karkat, doesn't find him above water, tenses ready to leap; Karkat bounds up, breaks the surface of the pool with vigorous splashing, grabbing for the edge. Dave would have water up to his collarbone where Karkat is, but with his hips unable to extend fully Dave isn't sure Karkat can even touch the bottom.

[ ](http://manyblinkinglights.tumblr.com/post/83664148935/art-block-o)

"You okay?" he calls out.

Karkat isn't coughing, at least. He cranes his neck to look at Dave, formerly fluffy bangs glued to his forehead, across his closed little eyes, his cheeks. His horns are visible almost all the way, and so are his porcupine quills.

"I'm fine. Just, yeah, what I figured, I know how to swim with a body like yours, which means with a body like mine I swim like an Olympic brick."

He cautiously lets go with one hand to illustrate, and, shit, yeah, there he goes, sinking again. When he starts kicking with his feet he resurfaces, but it's kind of frantic.

"Uh. You want a floaty thing, bro?" Dave pulls his feet out of the water, gets up cautiously. He's a bit tipsy, but it's not too bad. "I'll go look."

"Don't be stupid, I'll poke it full of holes in ten seconds."

"Nah, I think she has, like, foam boards."

Karkat stares at him for a second, and looks down pointedly at his plastron. "I don't think foam will cut it."

"How much do you even weigh anyway?"

Karkat spears him with a "how the fuck do you figure I would know" look, and starts dragging himself along the edge of the pool hand over hand. Dave isn't sure he likes him going toward the deeper end; he ambles around to join him. Might as well keep close, in case of... things. Yeah.

"How's the wing doing?" he asks, more quietly, once he's away from the hot tub and its load of broads.

Karkat flaps it cautiously, splattering Dave's rolled-up pants leg up to the hip. He lets himself sink to the chin, moves it slowly in the water; the skin bells out like veiny sails.

"I'll be sore, but so far it's fine. The water keeps me moving too slow to break it again."

Dave sinks into a crouch. "Yeah, that's what you think, but be careful anyway, okay? It's a lot of resistance."

Karkat glowers up at him. There are water drops in his eyelashes, glued together in thick clumps like he's put on makeup. His little upper eyes are still closed.

Dave is busy enough watching his eyes that he doesn't notice the clawed hand reaching for his knee until it's already catching the rolled-up cloth and tugging him forward.

" _Phone!_ " he yelps, and Karkat, all eyes gone just as wide as his, presses his hand flat against Dave's chest to steady him, kicking frantically against the water. Dave teeters briefly and then falls on his ass on the tiles. His heel skips and lands in the water, but his foot was wet already.

"Your phone or my phone?" Karkat asks, pulling himself up and flopping belly-down on the pool's edge. Dave glares. Karkat smirks, and puts a hand down Dave's pocket to fish it out. "Just kidding, the property damage order still applies."

He stretches past Dave's lap to put both phones and Dave's wallet as far from the water as he can, and since Dave has seen it coming and decided he doesn't care, he doesn't fight when his demon yanks him into the water by the thighs.

Splash. Somehow he manages not to get his face entirely submerged. One of his eyes closed, he glowers at Karkat tiredly.

The little asshole seems way too happy about finding a new way to get at him.

Dave makes a show of fishing out his car keys and lobbing them at the rest of his things, of sliding his shades on the tiles that way. On the other side of the pool in the hot tub Rose and Kankri are watching with distant interest; Roxy is cackling.

Dave splashes water at Karkat's face.

"H-hey!" Karkat splutters, and then dives, kicks off the floor of the pool; he moves surprisingly fast underwater, in short bursts.

He pushes Dave at the ankles, trips him; oh no, now Dave has to float, how terrible. Dave swims toward the other side of the pool, slow and casual, lording his floatability.

Karkat scuttles by underneath him, wings folded tight. Dave paddles to the side, too slow to avoid a poke to the stomach that makes him jerk. Not that he's ticklish. Totally not. That _traitor_.

He fights his way out of his drenched button-up shirt, flings it ashore, and dives after Karkat.

The brat isn't even swimming, just walking along the bottom, and he really didn't expect Dave to grab him by the tail, hand curved underneath near the root, and drag him backwards. Flailing in shock, Karkat loses some air; he kicks up to break the surface, twisting so Dave has to let go of his hold, and then he lets himself sink again with a dark glare, apparently planning to stay down there until Dave has to resurface.

Yeah, good plan, except it's not like Dave needs much oxygen to catch Karkat by the horns and let him haul Dave's weight around. Go forth, my submarine steed!

His ears pop a little when they scuttle toward the deep end, but he works at staying relaxed, almost limp. It's fascinating to observe the way Karkat moves in water, the way he splays his toes and skids against the slick bottom of the pool, the way his wings bell out and the plates of his armor shift with his movements. He's like a well-oiled machine.

Dave lets go with one hand to tickle behind Karkat's ear. Karkat twists like an eel in his hold and then they're face to face, his demon sitting on the bottom, and Dave's one hand somehow still gripping his horn, the other flailing against the water to try to get himself low enough to grab again -- hrrmph, stop squirming -- aha! Dual horn-grabbing achieved.

Karkat grabs him by the ribs, hauls him down to the bottom of the pool, and kisses him hard.

Dave snorts in some water, almost coughs up the rest of his oxygen. He fights to keep it in, keep kissing, and then predictably coughs right in Karkat's mouth. Karkat shoves him upwards.

He breaks the surface still coughing, grabs for the edge. Damn it. Since when does Karkat even kiss him first?!

... When he's trying to be an asshole, apparently, because there he is under the surface, in the shadow of Dave's own body, and when the water stops dancing quite as much behind the breaker of his arms Dave can see him smirking.

"You _jerk_ ," Dave hisses. He coughs another couple of times, watching with a gimlet eye as Karkat kicks off the bottom and waddle-prances off, breaching the surface here and there to breathe and dogpaddle for a bit before the weight of his chitin armor drags him back under. If he thinks he's just scored a point here, he's got another think coming.

Dave waits until Karkat has gone back to the bottom, and kicks off the wall. The main difference between their bodies is, Dave does not have shoulder spines that might poke him in the face or neck if he reaches too far up, and he can therefore do the crawl.

He's hovering over Karkat in seven seconds; when he dives Karkat has heard him, is already turning around. Dave's hand closes on the leading edge of his healthy wing, so that when he whirls he only drags Dave closer.

Dave winds his other hand around his neck, grabs the back of his skull, and kisses him back.

He can feel him growling right through the water. Score! He plants his feet on Karkat's hips and uses him as a springboard to swim off.

Incensed, Karkat gives chase. It's really hard to keep from grinning.

His pants get caught; he wriggles out of them like a fish, grabs at the last second for his underwear, already half-past his pasty ass, and escapes.

Karkat bursts out of the water to fling the pants at his head. "Asshole! What are you, a hermit crab?!"

Splat, on his head. Dave throws them out of the pool and ack, he's lost a precious second there and Karkat is coming in, oh no, dragged under again.

He winds an arm around the demon's shoulders and melts against him -- startling him, Karkat was expecting wrestling -- and then they're kissing again. It's awkward and weird underwater, he tries to deepen it and gets pool water trickling in instead when Karkat doesn't immediately follow suit and their lips don't mesh, and it's silly and makes him want to laugh. (They're in a spectacularly bad place for him to laugh.)

He ends up with his back pressed to the bottom tiles, Karkat like a boulder over him keeping him anchored -- he's not even trying to pin Dave but Dave just floats up into him and it's... strange, fun. His hair is doing the medusa thing into Karkat's little eyes and all over the place and...

Karkat pushes down on him, traps him with his weight, and he's going to run out of air soon, he's starting to feel a little dizzy and oh, Jesus, he's not going to add breathplay to his list of kinks, the biting thing is bad enough as it is, this is a stupid risk to take for a, a -- shit, thigh between his legs, gliding across his crotch.

A muted splash has him looking up, reflexively, and the kiss breaks and they both swallow water. Welp. They disengage, resurface; Dave tries to turn his back to the Jacuzzi area so the broads won't see the silly grin all over his face, even as he coughs.

"I can't _believe_ the two of you! Karkat in particular, such massive lack of respect when you know full well how aware of your activities I would be at this distaaaAUGH!"

Dave gets rapped over the back of the head by the edge of Kankri's wing. He dives in a hurry to avoid the rest of it, and when he looks up, wow, the surface is blocked by red membranes for a nice amount of square meters. Kankri is kicking and clawing at the water frantically, even as Karkat holds him up with a hand to his stomach, feet on the bottom.

Dave pushes up under a wing to get another breath, and dives out of the demon zone, gets to the other side of the pool and hangs off the edge.

"Kankri!" Rose calls out, calm but sharp. "Stop fighting, you'll drown Karkat." He does, between shocked and offended that she used his Name. "Spread your wings over the water," she advises, more gently. "You've got enough surface area to float."

Huh! So he does, Dave thinks. Kankri calms down after a while, though his back and shoulders are tense, reared back to keep his face as far out of the water as possible. He's covering over half of the pool with his sails, it's pretty ridiculous.

Karkat resurfaces under his nose, paddling hard to keep his mouth over the surface.

"That was so _immature_ , Karkat."

"Because trying to police everyone else -- pttb -- around you over something that -- hh, hhrk -- that wouldn't bother you at _all_ if you just _looked away_ \--" He breaks off for a coughing fit.

"Yes, indeed," Kankri replies bitterly, "and that's why the human police have no laws against exhibitionism! Oh, wait, _it seems they do_."

He lashes his tail in annoyance and the push against the water sends him moving forward and in an arc. Huh!

"Hey, Kanks, do the crocodile thing!" Roxy yells from the Jacuzzi, and illustrates with her hand, which isn't helpful at all because Kankri isn't looking her way. Dave catches his eye and does the same silly gesture, face blank. Asshole ruined his flirting spree.

"As if all Seers weren't voyeurs at heart," Karkat comments from the edge of the pool, where he's hanging by the hand catching his breath.

Kankri throws him the _nastiest_ glare. Rose goes, "I can confirm," solemnity spread like a too-thin coat of paint over a laugh.

"Make like you're a snake and undulate dat ass!" Roxy calls out, and stretches luxuriously across the empty spot Kankri left behind in the Jacuzzi.

Kankri doesn't seem happy, but apparently he figures that if he doesn't swim himself out of the pool no one will come and tow him, or maybe the roots of his wings are feeling the strain of supporting his weight -- his body has got to be even heavier than Karkat's, and Karkat sinks like his armor is made out of rock.

The problem is he swishes his tail a bit too close to the surface, and instead of pushing against the weight of the water, it shears through. And copiously splatters Dirk, who was walking in. Behind him, Aunt Romy chokes and then laughs, and Bro takes off his shades to clean them pointedly. Dave presses his lips together so he won't snort at the lot of them.

"Nice aim, Kankri," Dirk deadpans, annoyed and not bothering to hide it.

"My apologies for failing to have eyes in the back of my head, and for dragging myself into this pool while I'm at it!" Kankri snarls back, with a viciousness Dave is more used to seeing on Karkat. "Yes, our wet skin quotients are entirely comparable!"

The tail thing having failed, he starts kicking. It's awkward as hell. Sighing, Dave swims toward him and holds out his hand. Kankri takes it with a disdainful sniff and a bit too much urgency.

Dave tows him back to shore. It takes maybe thirty seconds. And now his flirty time is completely ruined.

He drags himself out of the pool before Kankri and offers once again a hand to haul him out, which requires a lot more effort than he thought; he's just lucky Kankri takes it slow enough that he has time to brace and shift his center of gravity lower.

Karkat dives and comes back up at Kankri's ass, giving a last push to shove him out. Dave almost goes down under him when he predictably trips.

"I guess I should award you a point for effort," Kankri says acidly to Karkat once he's back on solid ground. Dave turns away from the squabbling and goes to pick up his sodden clothes and the contents of his pockets. Urgh, his underwear is glued to his dick, wow, that sure is a thing he wants to show the woman side of his family. (The man side are all dudebros who have seen him wearing worse, and who deserve the unwanted visuals besides.)

He treads heavily around the pool, holding the pants and shirt before his crotch, Kankri stomping after him and Karkat following them from the water like a whale, breaching the surface here and there but otherwise content to stay near the bottom. He's got pretty good lungs, huh.

Roxy giggles when he approaches. Dave makes a face at her. His parental units are watching with smirks on their faces.

"Aw, you look like something the cat dragged in. Hop in!"

Looking amused herself, Rose gets up, pulls herself out of the hot tub. "I'll do you one better. I was about to go up to my room, I'll throw your clothes in the dryer on the way. Perhaps see if there are any pants up there that might fit your glorious behind."

"That's a lot of glory to contain," Dave acquiesces with a thoughtful nod. He wraps a towel around his hips, takes his underwear off underneath, and wraps up his boxers in his pants. "Thanks, sis. You're a goddess. Also I only have two kidneys on offer, just a reminder."

She snorts. "Get in the tub already, before I decide your towel needs dried too."

Dave puts the phones and wallet on the bench where the old people and Dirk are sitting and gets in the tub already. Satisfied, Rose towels herself dry and departs.

Hff, it's hot in here after the pool, but it feels good too. Dave stretches his legs cautiously in the water, makes himself comfortable.

"They've still got bedrooms here?" Bro is saying to Aunt Romy. "Tch. That's only encouraging dependence on Mommy, you know. You gotta kick 'em out of the nest once and for all. Now me, I reclaimed my territory the second they were out."

Romy is smirking and seems to find Bro's opinion hilarious and inconsequential. Yeah, seems about usual. Dirk, though...

"Who'd _want_ to move back in with you? A hobo with a cardboard box house and a hoarding problem would be a better host."

Welp.

Dave can see this edging toward Dirk coming out and saying he was glad to have left, and Bro will pretend not to have hurt feelings about it while nursing his grudge to the end of the world. (Dave is so _glad_ to have moved out, because Bro and Dirk under the same roof can make anything into a land war in Asia.)

"Nah, he totally pined when you moved out," Dave drawls, and wriggles his toes in the bubbly water. His eyes crinkle. "He'd walk into our room at random and sit at your desk and just hang out for like hours talking about total pointless bullshit."

Dirk's left eyebrow goes up. Bro's scrunches down in "no this is only _joking_ annoyance see I'm only using one of them to frown with." They are so father and son, holy shit.

Roxy, giggling, waves Karkat closer when he finally drags himself out of the pool, and climbs out of the hot tub. Karkat wanders closer like he's not too sure he wants to try it, but Dave is pretty sure of the looks he's giving Kankri -- he's gotta be thinking that if Kankri is enjoying it then it must be enjoyable. Even odds he's gonna refuse to climb in just to be contrary.

Bro pouts. "Like fuck I pined, _you_ pined, I was just trying to cut down on the whining. Wah, _Dirk_ would have helped me with my homework, _Dirk_ would have played that game with me--"

"Oh, like hell," Dave interrupts, and turns pointedly away to look at Karkat. "Hey, get in, it's cool, you'll like it." And over his shoulder, "That is so much bullshit, Bro. There was a goddamn reason I never asked you for help with homework, and that was because you're a goddamn _troll_."

"I was teaching you self-reliance and how to check your sources," Bro intones with oddly pious echoes that make Dave think of Kankri a bit. He rolls his eyes so hard he thinks he might sprain something.

"Uh huh."

"To be fair, Dave, you _are_ easily trolled," Dirk comments, in that 'no this is a totally neutral and fair assessment and I'm even a bit bored making it' tone that gets Dave's back up. Dave glares. Teach him to try to be nice to Dirk.

A hand in the tub to check the temperature, Karkat is listening with a critical, interested look. Dave bets he's gathering ammo for later. Urgh.

"Yeah, guys, keep making me regret I didn't get to live here with the girls after all. Hell, I'd even be happy I still had a room at my parents' if it were here. I'd come back every weekend. I'd be the dutiful son."

Aunt Romy stretches over Bro's lap to pat his head. "You'd have been my favorite," she says mournfully. Roxy goes pfft.

"I wish you were my mom," Dave says mournfully, mostly because it's not true (not anymore, at least. There were times during his teenage years...) "So not fair. No battles over the water heater, no douchebag neighbors yelling about how my fine-ass music is too loud..."

Karkat decides himself all at once and slips in the tub with a splash. Dave watches him from the corner of his eye, the wary look as he decides whether he likes it, and then the way he sighs a tiny sigh and relaxes against the edge of the hot tub. Score!

Especially since Kankri's first time, he took like a five minute break to deal with the sensory info before he even started talking again.

"I really don't get how your fucked up mammalian kin thing even works," Karkat is already saying, idle, stretching his legs all the way across, murdertoes skimming the bubbling surface. "I mean, I get the general theory but you assholes seem happy to go against it at every possible opportunity, which is especially fucked up considering I got my data dump of knowledge about that shit straight off the asshole in chief himself."

"Yeah, we're weird like that," Dave says. "See, okay, there was a normal set of grandparents Strider that fricked normally, made two baby boys one after the other. One was my biological genitor, one was this pile of dicks and puppets over there. And meanwhile on the other side there were the Lalondes, pretty much in the same situation, and one was my bio mom and one was Aunt Romy. Still following?"

Karkat snorts, looking at him, but doesn't say he's not actually interested in his summoner's old family history, and Dave knows he would.

"My bio dad and mom were cops, and they fricked, and made me and Rose, and then they died on the job." Dave shrugs. No baggage here, no sirree. "We were like, I don't know. Babies. How old were we?" he asks Romy, briefly distracted.

She takes a sip of her eternal martini, humming. "Oh, maybe a couple of months? Your mom probably should have been on maternity leave still, but there was this... well." Her voice wobbles a little. Dave remembers that this woman he never knew was her older sister, that they grew up together. "Guess she didn't want to let her partner go alone. I suppose you'd know how that is."

"... Yeah." Fuck, it must have destroyed her to see Rose and Dave choose the Force, and then Roxy and Dirk coming with... "Mm." Urgh, this is depressing. "Okay so by then Bro had already fricked with Aunt Romy and tadahh, Roxy--" she waves from the pool-- "--and I don't actually know how Dirk happened."

"Sprang from my thigh fully formed," Bro says blandly.

"Zeus says copyright infringement."

"Okay, I made him via demon experiments, he is actually my magical clone."

Romy is snickering. "Don't you think your kids are old enough to know by now--"

" _I_ know," Dirk says sharply. "It's not my fault Dave never thought to ask."

Dave blinks. "Well, uh, I figured Bro tried pussy at some point in his life, and it didn't agree with him...?" And he figured if Dirk or Bro wanted him to know more than that they would tell him. They're such fortresses, those bastards.

Dirk's shrug isn't casual by far, though he's trying to make it so. "In the throes of no homo he went and fucked this chick, to make sure the ewws from fucking Romy weren't a fluke. Turns out gay sperm is not inherently sterile. We are all surprised by this stunning scientific discovery."

Oh god.

"Then feeling the impending babydaddydom he decided his girlfriend's brother had, like, all the hotness she did, minus those bothersome tits, plus a nice dick. It was too late to abort me by then, so she had me, landed Bro with me, and ollied the fuck out. For which I blame her not a whit."

Yeah um, Dave is pretty sure Dirk should blame her at _least_ a little bit, for not even staying in touch if nothing else, but he and Bro are too similar to get along for long, so it doesn't surprise Dave one bit that Bro is getting blamed for the whole mess.

"Here I thought soap operas were supposed to be unrealistic," Karkat says with this smug, satisfied face.

"You haven't even heard the best part," Bro replies, nodding wisely, "but it's spoiler for the last season, so I won't be telling you."

Romy kicks him. Dave sighs. "Ha ha lame."

Urgh. The atmosphere has taken a major nosedive. And Dirk doesn't seem amused by Bro's joking, either. Quick, move along.

"Okay then so we had no other family so it was their responsibility to take care of us, so they took one each. That's about it."

"Truly?" Kankri inquires with mild curiosity. "From what I understand of your legal system and what you inferred about your living place, Detectives Strider, shouldn't the court award custody of both twins to the same person? Especially since Mrs. Lalonde had better means?"

Bro's expression doesn't change but Dave winces anyways. Aunt Romy smiles, close-mouthed. "We agreed that it was more fair to share the load. I do have a job, you know, it's fairly sexist to expect me to dump my career and devote myself to raising three children on the basis of gender, and Bro's means weren't, like, insufficient, they never lived in squalor."

"Hm. I see." All of Kankri's eyes are squinting a bit.

The way he's looking at them, Dave briefly wonders if he didn't mean See with an uppercase. "Hey, no seering at people without supervision, bro."

"I can no more stop 'seering' than you can stop interposing your fragile corporeal envelope between danger and random passersby falling even passingly under your protection with nary a thought as to the consequences."

"Shots fired," Bro whispers to Karkat, who snorts.

"Hey, I'm a knight too, fuck you, Kankri."

"Yes, so I doubly know what I'm speaking about -- _if you kick me...!_ "

"Yeah?" Karkat leans in, teeth bared a bit. "What'll happen if I kick you?"

"The ensuing struggle will leave your master shredded up quite nicely," Kankri says, but more like a threat than like he knows it. It's a pretty likely result, though. Sighing, Dave stretches his legs between them and pushes Karkat's knee away from Kankri's before they can start kicking anyways.

Karkat subsides with a heavy sigh and flops back against the edge of the hot tub, arms crossed. His eyes have gone heavy-lidded. Dave wonders how he's enjoying it, but he doesn't want to start asking that stuff around his family.

Maybe later. He likes finding things Karkat enjoys. He wouldn't mind making the trip more regular if it means Karkat has a good time.

"Well!" Romy says with frightening good cheer. "They do seem to feel lively! I was wondering how the distance from the hell gate would affect them, but so far it seems not at all. Karkat, Kankri?"

They stare at her together, the same nonplussed expression on their faces. Dave presses his lips tight together.

"Ah. I have noticed no difference in my personal health, though I have not attempted to use much in terms of magic..."

Oh great, they're about to talk shop for the next hour. Dave slides down until his chin is underwater. It's better than airing the family's dirty laundry, at least.

Why is Roxy off swimming laps when she could be keeping Dave entertained.

"Hey, Karkat," he asks quietly, leaning toward him. "How's the water so far? You're not overheating yet or anything, yeah?"

Karkat grunts, eyes half-closed. "I'm fine. Shut up." His wing tips curl almost horizontal in the water and the spokes fan out, and he lets out a tiny sigh, eyelids dropping almost all the way closed. Dave can see the bubbles gathering and pushing up underneath the membrane.

Okay, yeah, hot tubs definitely have a place on Karkat's list of physical yays. Too bad it's not really feasible for Dave to buy one. Remodeling the shower, maybe...

He is going to run up his water bill something awful. Might be worth it.

"I've got to go," Rose announces as she walks back in. She's not loose and smiling anymore. Dave sits up, eyebrows knitting. "Kankri, get ready, please."

"Aw, why'd you gotta?" her mom says, and makes a kicked puppy face.

"John just called. Spades Slick escaped three hours ago, we have an infestation of journalists. Press conference in two hours. I need to be there."

Yeah, John is hit or miss when it's about talking to the press; he has a good contact with them, and they usually like him, but he's not as tight-fisted with info they shouldn't have as Rose is.

Karkat's whole body has gone on point, alive and alert with interest.

Rose drops an armful of clothes on the bench. "Dave," she says as she gets a fresh towel and approaches Kankri to help rub him dry, "your underwear is dry, but your pants aren't. I brought you jeans plus a t-shirt in case you didn't want to pickle in here that long but you don't have to wear th--"

"I should go back too," Dirk says.

Yeah right. He's been looking for a chance to escape all afternoon, Dave bets.

"I took home some folders yesterday, you're going to need them."

For a second Dave wonders why the heck Dirk would have folders related to a case he's not working, but then he figures it out. He might not be working on the Midnight Crew but he _is_ working on the Felt, and the two cases are pretty interlinked.

"No, it's okay," Rose says absently as she sponges Kankri's wings vaguely dry. "John said he sent Jane over. She's got your keys, right?"

Dirk gives him a mulish look. Dave sighs. Who's got the car here? Yeah, it's him. "Why d'you gotta be such a workaholic, bro? You know it's the quickest road to burnout city."

Dirk's face has gone completely unreadable. "Yeah," he says, "I think I'd rather go back anyway, just in case. When did John send her?"

His phone rings, and he pulls it out of his pocket and looks down at the display and then he's up.

"... Be right back."

Rose scrubs. Dave tries to enjoy his remaining time in the hot tub, but it's pretty much doomed to failure; with a sigh, he pulls himself out.

"Aww. I'm losing all my children at once. That's so unfair."

Bro pats aunt Romy's back. "C'mon. You still have Roxers."

"That's true," Romy says, and then yells to her daughter, who's still doing laps, "Roxy! You're my favorite!"

"What did Dave do?" Roxy yells back. Haha welp.

Dave dries himself and puts his underwear back on, gets de-toweled. Dirk walks back in. His face looks -- oh, hell. Doom and thunder ahoy.

"Dave--" he pauses briefly when he sees Dave already out, but not long. "Give me your keys, and you can drive back with Bro and Roxy later. Yeah?"

It is so not a question. Dave shrugs carelessly and pretends he doesn't know that. "Nah, bro, I'll drive you."

"That's not necessary. And you drank anyway, you can't drive back yet."

Okay, suspicious now. "Naww, It was two drinks four hours ago. I'm fine. You want the Breathalyzer?"

Dave doesn't really wait for Dirk to decide if he wants it, it was a trick question.

"I dunno how I'd get my car back afterwards, it'd be a mess." He pulls the jeans up his legs. Roxy will bring back his dress pants when they're dry, and if she forgets, he's got other pairs at home. "Karkat, you wanna hang out here? Bro can drive you home -- Jesus, why does this fit so well."

He spends a second or three eyeing himself in the reflection of the windowpane separating them from the river. They're girls' jeans with the ridiculously clingy legs. Dirk looks ready to throw his hands up, but he breathes out through his nose and walks out with a sharp "I'll wait by the car."

"Uh huh. I've got an awesome ass, just saying."

Karkat hauls himself out of the hot tub, and brings half of the water with him. "Stop preening."

"No, but you can stay--"

"I'm coming. Are you kidding me? You'll get yourself attacked by a gang of primary school kids with sharpened spoons and a Class Five at their beck and call somehow."

"Aw, you care!" He puts Rose's t-shirt on. It's lavender; there's a cartoon kitten on it. Hell yes. "It's because of the pants, isn't it. Yeah, must be. After all you're at just the right eye level for the full effect--"

Karkat smacks his ass.

Dave's jaw snaps closed.

"Oh my _god_ ," Aunt Romy says, and starts giggling her head off. Bro is snorfling, and if Roxy doesn't drown he'll be surprised.

Did Karkat just. Did. _Okay_ , it wasn't a hand-open, groping slap, more of a sharp backhand meant to sting, but. Jesus. Wow. Um.

Karkat's eyebrow is arching _way_ too high, the little turd. Dave glares at him, face gone scarlet, and throw a towel over his face.

"... Dry your hair."

He takes back the phones and wallet and stuff (though Rose's jeans pockets are ridiculous and won't hold anything but his keys) and goes to say his goodbyes, which mostly involves hugging Romy and waving to Roxy; he pretends he's going to forget the fist bump to Bro until almost too late. Rose is already on her way out with Kankri in tow -- "It was a pleasure to be here," Kankri assures them pointedly as he passes the door.

When Dave and Karkat reach the front door Lil Cal is sitting on the couch's back and staring straight at them. Urgh. Dave waves anyway, wary, and then they're off.

\--

"So," Dave says after a whole hour has gone back in brooding and heavy silence and the strangely cautious clicking of Karkat's claws on his phone. "What's in those files?"

Look how casual he is. Just making conversation here, buddy.

Dirk, sitting beside him, grunts without looking away from the window. Dave waits. If he gets pushy, his brother will lock up --

"New vics' profiles, a few of the old ones for comparison," Dirk says eventually, distantly polite, like he doesn't care.

He _does_ care, but he doesn't care enough that he won't use it as a misdirection, which means the bigger issue is not in the files itself. Interesting.

"Yeah? Anything good?"

Look at all that road Dave is driving across. _Mmmmm_ , driving. It's still a fairly mountainous road, a nice slope on the side and some tight turns, it's not weird if he has to concentrate on it a bit, is it?

Click click click, go Karkat's claws behind them, but all slow and cautious, like he doesn't want to remind them he's here.

"Aren't you supposed to not be on it?"

Dave doesn't even bother answering that one. They've got four cops in the family and they fucking work together, small talk is case talk five days out of the week -- and that only when they don't see each other during the weekends.

Dirk relents. "MO's changed," he says.

Dave arches an eyebrow, sneaks his brother a look in the rear view mirror. "Huh."

"Not _obviously_ , but... The attacks go about the same way, it's the victims that don't fit. Over half of them were affiliated with the Felt. Plus a lot more bystanders are getting dragged in. If only as witnesses."

" _Huh_." Okay, yeah. The Felt was the _aggressor_ last time. "Think Kurloz turned against them as revenge? Or would it even do revenge. Got nabbed by another group, maybe?"

Okay, he said something wrong. Dirk was starting to get more animated, that set of his shoulders that means 'about to explain you a thing' -- but at Dave's words he digs back into his seat, crossed arms tightening over his chest.

"Dirk?"

"It's not Kurloz," Dirk says, voice low and tired, like he's been telling and _telling_ people and no one has been listening, and Dave would buy it only...

One, he hasn't offered any proof why this can't be Kurloz. Until proof to the contrary...

Two, powers that express themselves so similarly?

It's possible, of course. It'd just be a hell of a coincidence.

"Okay, bro. Why can't it be Kurloz?"

Karkat snorts from the foot well behind Dave's seat. "He got his dolphin ass munched. Rage or not, he's not about to revive from a well-digested turd into a full Class Four in three miraculous days."

Dave snorts. "Yeah, Jesus he ain't, and thank fuck for that."

Dirk grunts, and turns back toward the window with finality.

Yeah, never fucking mind. He'll find out some other way.

\--

They turn into the parking lot at the bottom of Dirk's apartment building and Dave almost stands on the brakes.

There's Jane's car, still here two hours later.

There's Jake's, too, and two police cruisers. Holy flipping fuck.

Dirk twitches and leans forward beside him, visibly startled, and Karkat's head pops up between the seats like he thinks he's a groundhog.

Dave looks for a parking spot, wondering what the fuck very strenuously. What did Dirk even _do_? Were the folders the only things he brought home, or what?

He finds a spot, starts aiming himself in; his cell phone rings. Shit. "Karkat, get it, willya." A clawed hand makes its way down his pocket. "Put it on loudspeaker."

"Yeah, yeah."

" _Dave, is that your car?_ "

Okay. That's Jane. Jane who is Dirk's partner, but calling him.

Jane who sounds so far past pissed off she has gone back around to sounding calm again. Steely. Dave can hear Captain Egbert all over her voice. "Yes, ma'am."

" _Dirk is with you._ "

It's not a question; he answers yes anyway.

Dirk's fingers have gone bloodless white on the seat cushion.

" _Right. The two of you are coming straight up. And Dave -- you are not to let Detective Dirk Strider touch **anything**. Order from the captain._ "

Mutely, Dave takes his phone back from Karkat and stops the car.

"Copy," he says, "Over and out," and hangs up.

Jesus fucking dick.

He doesn't say anything; he's not one to start yelling without knowing what the fuck is even going on. He gets out of the car, waits for his passengers to follow, locks it.

Dirk is sneaking him side glances but Dave can't even look at him right now.

He starts for the door, strides purposeful and elastic. Karkat trots at his heels, for once silent, wary. Dirk follows with his jaw set and his shoulders just a little drawn in.

Deep down Dave is a bit glad to see that Dirk is not thinking he's too in the right to be in deep shit.

The elevator works, at least. Like Dave, Dirk went for a top floor apartment; means a nice little chunk of time spent in silence in close space, but after the car it comes easy.

Two uniforms are keeping watch on the wide open door to Dirk's flat. It's too normal and not right. You don't bring the job to your home, not like this. Dave pulls out his ID, lets them process him through and into the scene.

Dave passes the threshold and something like scales rasps restlessly in his mind. Latula says nothing, so he keeps going. Karkat stops moving.

"You're allowed in," Dirk says. A cat's tail lashes briefly around his legs and wisps away.

Shuddering, Karkat hops across.

Dave turns to look at the living room.

At least Captain Egbert isn't here, he guesses, but that's not such a surefire endorsement about the depth of this shit pit, considering he's busy holding a press conference at the moment. No, Dave is being pessimistic, surely it's not that bad.

Around the dinner table, Jane, two cops, and one civilian-looking woman, tall and Asian and pretty unexpected.

"My partner, Detective-Summoner Dirk Strider," Jane introduces, and she almost doesn't sound furious underneath. "Detective-Summoner Dave Strider, and Karkat Vantas, Dave's demon." Dave nods.

"Lieutenant Gino Alieri, Magical Research and Analysis, and you know Kate Turill, Magical Forensics. This is Professor Wren Qing of the University of Colland, who's an expert in summoning patterns."

"Wowza," Karkat mutters, flat and cynical. "Let me guess, you opened a fully functional hell gate in your toilet bowl."

Stony silence. And then Jane tells Dirk, "sit here," nodding at a chair. Dirk sits without a word. Dave is left standing.

"Dave," she tells him. "You might want to take a look at the bedroom."

"Ah," Professor Qing says, a hand raised delicately. "Mister Vantas should probably wait outside. The effects of the Blood attribute on ambient magic are far from well known."

"He won't be able to go in," Dirk says from his seat, facing forward and not sparing them a glance.

Karkat bristles. "Then we're not going in. Master, I'm authorizing myself to drag you the hell away from shitty life decisions, and this seems to be one of them."

Jane breathes sharply through her nose. "It's _stable_ , Karkat." (Doesn't say it's safe.) She looks up at Dave. "Detective English is in already. Go."

And _there_ Dirk flinches. Dave turns away and starts down the corridor, a fuming demon on his heels.

"I'm serious, if I can't come in and save you --"

"Spell's prolly anchored to the walls," Dave says, faking nonchalance. "Of course if you destroyed the walls you'd probably cause a rebound that would kill me anyways but -- yeah."

Ain't no order he can give right now that would supersede keeping him alive, for Karkat. The neighbors, the other cops... Bah.

A woman in uniform is outside; they nod to each other. The door is cracked open.

He pushes it farther open, his hand crossing into the bedroom, and Latula slams her armor closed over him, see-through scales rushing up his arm.

Karkat hisses softly between his teeth, cricket-raspy.

Dave is about to walk in when he feels a tug on the back of his shirt.

"I'll be careful," he promises. "I've got the girls, yeah?" Latula won't let him down. His Time ladies are less of a sure thing, but he'll manage. Jane wouldn't tell him to him go in if this was an active site.

_Latula?_

_... Yeah, you can go in,_ she says, but reluctantly. _Nah, not scoping any danger here, I just..._

He walks into the room and it's not dark, there are candles (candles because a light bulb would blow from the magic in the air.) There was never a bed in here; Dirk sleeps on the couch in the living room. Lots of floor space.

The pattern Jake is gazing pensively at is the most complex thing Dave has ever seen with his own eyes, and is probably in line for the crown against a lot of fancy ones he's only seen in pictures, in passing. Karkat's summoning pattern wasn't half that layered -- six, no, seven concentric star patterns, the corners oddly folded, forked back in.

Inside the circle there's nothing visible but the light seems to die as it comes close. A faint heat shimmer, maybe...

He takes another step closer and Latula snorts, half nerves and half relieved. Her grasp loosens, and then Dave can feel it.

It's nothing so clear as a Name, just eerie laughter in the dark, a feeling of sinister welcome -- _come and play_ as said by something that plays mostly with its food.

"Ah, hello, Strider," Jake says absently. He doesn't look away from the pattern.

"Hey, English."

"Is your brother--"

Dave so doesn't want to talk about fucking Dirk right now, wow. "Being grilled, I guess. Yeah. What am I looking at?"

Jake waves his hand vaguely. It's rare to see him pensive -- worried?

"I don't have any sensor types in my employ," he says, "But Tavros tells me..."

"Yeah?"

"It's a baby," Jake says.

Dave blinks.

"Mother of _fuck!_ " Karkat snarls from the doorway; Dave twitched to check on him, hearing him yelping. He tried to push through the door, and it sparked at him. Dave frowns.

"Karkat, stay back."

"What baby is it?! Shit, _shit_ \--" He takes in a deep breath, tries to calm down. All his eyes are wide open. "What is it _doing_ on this plane, that's not--"

 ** _Play with me_** , something whisper-laughs at the edge of his mind. The shadow seems to pulse, to purr ( _ **yes, tasty.**_ )

Latula catches it for him, unwinds it. It's an abandoned amusement park at dusk, it's being watched when there is nothing there, haunted places, horror novels about killer clowns --

"It's Kurloz," Jake says. "The baby. From what I gathered."

It takes Dave at least five seconds to react to that one. It's just so... _what_. "Wait. You're telling me, the baby is Kurloz's baby, or _Kurloz_ , as a baby?"

"Oh! Second one." Jake blinks at him, vaguely bewildered. "He has, ah, regressed? I don't get it at all. The Professora's explanations went quite above my old noggin, I'm afraid."

Behind them Karkat is swearing under his breath, a long stream of invectives and gross curses. Dave just...

... really wishes he _had_ gotten drunk. The tipsiness of noon is long gone and he does not like it.

"I don't understand that man at all!" Jake erupts suddenly, throwing his hands up, but his face is conflicted, the look he turns on Dave pleading. "Why would he work so hard to rehabilitate the very demon who tried to kill his siblings?"

Yeah, funny, Dave doesn't wonder. It's really Dirk to the fingertips.

"Sure none of you guys want to explain to me how demon reproduction works?" he asks -- Karkat, Latula, any demon who'll talk.

 _Tell, no. You say yes, I **show** you_, Damara purrs -- or growls. It's a threat, as wrapped in the sensual as it is.

Latula bares her fangs. _Don't **even.** _I will shred you down to plankton.__

"Is that because it's actually a threat, or because I'm not supposed to know?" Dave asks, exasperated. "Like, seriously, why do you assholes make such a huge deal out of it, I bet it's pointless as fuck--"

 _It's both,_ Latula says. _She would fuck you to death. On account of **you'd die,** Dave._

 _But much pleasure before you croak like useless dildo no batteries_.

Dave snorts. _Do you have any other register than gross come-ons? If you're not about to be useful, buzz off._

She bares mind fangs. Looks like a no! He grabs onto her Name and -- almost shoves.

But.

Mind crammed full of blizzards and inescapable, violent endings, he thinks, without even aiming, _Can you do that?_

_Anything you need, homeslice._

Damara screeches, but Dave's hold on her Name is as strong as it's ever been -- in here, with the magic everywhere in the air, with his anger in chiming harmony with her ice shrapnel.

Latula's maw snaps closed like a bear trap over and around her, containing her inside Dave's skull, snuggled too tight. He wants to hit things until they crumble to dust; he makes himself walk out instead.

"Strider?" Jake says behind him, but Dave can't risk disturbing his concentration. He ignores Karkat too as he trots on his heels, peering up at him in worried bafflement.

"--never mind the fucking _permit_ ," Jane is saying, "this is a _habitation building!_ "

"And I'm daring you to find a single crack in the containment spells," Dirk says back; "It's not like I could stuff him in some remote area I couldn't watch over--"

Dave clears his throat.

"Dirk."

It's not his voice that stops them all, it's the sight of Latula's scales all over him, still see-through but the most solid they've been outside of actual combat, he's sure. Professor Qing's eyebrows go up as she looks him over; the forensics woman's hand actually goes down to her pocket. (Probably a weapon in here. More probably a demon offering.)

"Need a clock. Now. I'll pay you back."

Dirk doesn't question him, probably doesn't need to. "Couch side table, alarm clock."

"Did you use a spell in that room?" Turill asks him, alarmed.

"No," Dave says, already walking past the table. "Need a confidentiality clause for one of my riders. We don't need this leaked."

If there's even the slightest risk Kurloz will recover enough to talk, the Felt is going to be on it like white on rice.

That, and they don't need Damara or some other demon deciding to check if they can break into Kurloz' enclosure from the ether, have themselves a snack maybe, or use it as their own private hell gate. Dirk warded it thoroughly against intrusions from the material plane, but... Demons are weird, and unique demons who can do shit no other demon can are everyfuckingwhere.

He lets Damara's anger take him until he can't tell if she's the one moving his hand when he sweeps the electronic alarm clock off the catch-all table, swings it up, and smashes it to the floor.

_You will not tell or hint to anyone else about the presence and existence of the demon that's inside the pattern in Dirk Strider's bedroom at this time. You will not attack, eat, damage, or otherwise interfere or knowingly assist anyone else in attacking, eating, damaging, or otherwise interfering with the demon that's inside the pattern in Dirk Strider's bedroom at this time._

Damara howls.

Dave smashes the clock into the ground again, until half of it breaks off and goes careening into the TV stand.

_Fine! Maybe I will not do that!_

_No 'maybe'._

He lifts his foot, and lets her slam his heel right into it. It hurts. The pain makes her purr.

_... Yes. Good. Yes._

Dave straightens up. Latula's mind-jaws loosen. Immediately Damara is streaking off with a stream of obscenities, half of which sound like enraptured come-ons and the other half like death threats.

He pushes the pieces together with his foot. He can't make himself look back at the other people in the room. He just.

He really hates being this angry -- acting out in anger. He's always been the guy it flows over. (The one who turns it inwards, pretends it's not there.) He could blame the destructiveness on Damara, but she was really just a convenient trigger.

It's been a shitty day. As much as he loves his family, they're raging bags of dicks, and he doesn't want to be dragged in between Bro and Dirk. He'd spent his teenage years practicing his blind and deaf monkey routine. (Not the mute one. Ain't no force on earth that could stop him spouting bullshit with a smidgen of provocation.)

It's been a shitty week. When can he go back to work? He feels useless, rusty. Bored.

And then _this_.

He can't be angry at Dirk for professional and ethical reasons as well. They're brothers. He can't. It's too much.

 _You should leave harshing his dumb groove to his partner,_ Latula whispers. _Think about how she must feel._

Dave sighs in meatspace. "Yeah, I'll try that."

He gets a wastebasket and shovels the mess in, ignoring the voices cautiously starting to resume at his back.

Karkat sits on his haunches at Dave's side, arms crossed loosely over his chest, and peers at him. Dave studiously ignores that. Way to make him feel stupid.

"You should buy her a sledgehammer. More bang for your buck. For all the sense that expression makes in this context."

Dave huffs soundlessly, half a laugh and half _yeah right no_. "Worked before you overthought it, bro." Sigh. Okay, a piece skittered off under the couch. He bends down and feels around for it.

"What'd you order her to do?"

"To shut up about Kurloz," Dave grunts, still bent over.

"Sure as fuck hope you didn't use those terms," Karkat says, almost idly except for the way he still watches him from the corner of his eye, like he thinks Dave is going to explode again.

Dave works hard on not throwing him an annoyed glance. Oh look, a dust bunny. Fascinating. "I'm not _quite_ that stupid, no."

"You meat monkeys have such a weirdly hard time grasping soul names instead of those arbitrary mouth noises, I mean. We don't even know if he'll be a Kurloz again."

\-- huh. "Huh?" Dave asks, sitting up with his prize in hand, plus a nervous spider. It skedaddles off his thumb right quick.

Karkat blows on it to redirect it back toward the couch, just as studiously avoiding Dave's eyes as Dave was avoiding his a minute ago.

"Kurloz got munched. This one's just fragments of him. They might grow back different this time around. Might be vocalized Carlos this time for all we know."

Dave arches an eyebrow. "Huh. No Kurloz Junior?"

Karkat groans, glowers at him from under his bangs.

"Kurloz Mark Two."

A groan, mostly faked.

"The return of the revenge of the bride of Kurloz." A pause. "Kurloz for short."

Karkat rolls his eyes, and shoves Dave so that he topples onto his ass.

"Okay, if you're done spouting bullshit, my feeding sack is demanding sweet and sour sauce poured on a shit-ton of random food things."

Dave climbs back to his feet. Yeah, they're pretty much done here. Even if he wasn't on leave he wouldn't get asked to assist when his own brother is involved. Hello, conflict of interests. "Chen's Dumpling House then?"

"Where the fuck else."

He sneaks a scritch to the root of Karkat's horn before he goes back to the table to take his leave and get them home.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> porn ahead wooo.

**Dave Strider** @turntechgodhead  
 **#springcleaning yo peeps who wanna feast their eyes on this choice domestic babe in an apron and authentic feather duster http://...**

Dave snaps another pouty picture, uploads it, then puts the phone down for five minutes so he can finish dusting his vinyl records shelf.

He is totally wearing an apron. The feather duster is synthetic though. Neon green. Hey, it was cheap.

It's a nice afternoon outside; all his windows are open wide to let in a breeze, though since they're all facing the same side of the building he'd only get a real one going if he opened the front door too.

Then again there's a lot of loose paper he hasn't put away yet, so he probably shouldn't.

Wow, what a perfect time to check his phone again.

**@turntechgodhead LOSE THE SHIRT YEEEHAW**  
 **man ur cute @turntechgodhead**  
 **@turntechgodhead #gayyyyyyyyyyyyy**  
 **@turntechgodhead ok good now the same in NOTHING but an apron ;3**  
 **@turntechgodhead Where's Karkat???**

Yeah, ever since Karkat's follower count passed his, he's been getting followers through him, but they're here mostly for more domestic demon shenanigans. Pssh. What about following Dave for _Dave_? Posers. _Noobs_.

He snaps a picture of Karkat sitting up on the window seat gazing at the sky and scratching idly at the tendon bits under his knee spur, and attaches it to his reply.

**#fuckyeahpetdemon guess whos slacking while others toil endlessly to render his living arrangements as dust free as humanly possible http://...**

Fifteen seconds later he's getting pinged back.

**@turntechgodhead WANT MY HELP? SURE THING. I COULD GET RID OF THOSE POINTLESS DUST TRAPS FOR YOU *AND* FURTHER MY UNDERSTANDING OF GRAVITY. HOW'S THAT FOR EFFICIENCY.**

**@cruorGuardian touch my jar collection and you will be its replacement**

**@turntechgodhead SHOULD I EVEN MENTION HOW EASY IT'S GOING TO FIND A JAR I CAN FIT IN.**

**@cruorGuardian seein no problem here bro if you dont fit in a big one i can fit you into many small ones easy**  
 **@cruorGuardian did u see my katana ps i got a katana did i mention that**

**@turntechgodhead YOU MEAN CHEAP STEEL CENTRAL? YEAH, GO AHEAD. THAT'LL BE FUNNY.**

**@cruorGuardian oi oi its so not you wouldnt call it cheap if you knew how much it flattened my wallet k**

**@turntechgodhead BOY HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU.**  
 **@turntechgodhead *HONEY*... IT DOESN'T EVEN STING WHEN I TOUCH IT.**  
 **@turntechgodhead I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S MADE OF BUT IRON DOESN'T SEEM TO BE A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF IT.**

Dave takes a quick selfie of his own sad pout and uploads it. He hears Karkat huff quietly through his nose and imagines him smiling at his phone. Maybe smirking in smug victory. Brat.

They're five steps away from each other. Dave guesses he could turn around and talk to him directly, too.

Eh. He likes boosting Karkat's ego, and nothing does that like winning an argument in front of his adoring army of fans.

Karkat calling him honey, even if it's with the utmost derision... It's giving him this pang of awkward yearning, of "I _wish_." If he pretended hard enough that it's nice, though, he could totally tease him for that choice of endearment. (why not darling while youre at it you dork  <3)

He spends a whole and entire second gazing soulfully at the word before he makes himself refresh the page so it's not visible without scrolling anymore. Pff. How stupid.

Here he thought the dramatic sorry-for-myself, finding-tragic-meaning-in-an-abandoned-chewing-gum-wrapper stage was a byproduct of being a teenager at the time. Welp. Sorry, Jane.

Well. He actually did write her three-years-older glory a rap where the words MILFness and I Crave A Woman Not A Girl featured prominently, along with eyes both cornflower and cerulean. At least he hasn't written Karkat anything that embarrassing yet.

He wonders when so many of his dead things in jars got relegated to boxes and corners behind other trinkets. (Was it at the same time he figured out that cables everywhere across the floor were a dudebro hazard and started laying them out smarter?) He takes out the jars to dust, and then spreads them out properly, so they're all nicely visible. Ahh, his Janus kitten fetus. Hey there little guy.

Dusting gets almost meditative after a while, but there's a finite amount of apartment to flay, and he has _just_ realized, doing the ladder, that if he washes the floor first and _then_ does the loft he'll have to do the floor again.

Sigh.

He climbs, strips the comforter of its quilt cover, and the sheets off the futon, rolls them up to chuck to the ground. Might as well wash them today while he's at it. Okay, and this is trash, _that_ has a designated spot just five inches farther on the shelf, _these_ cables only need twenty seconds to untangle and wind up properly...

He shuffles his way on his knees around the futon, head bowed, clearing off the floor.

"Hey, Karkat, gonna have to dismantle your nest so I can wash the sheets, okay?"

Ow, his spine is going to hurt soon. Stupid slanted ceiling. He plucks out the marshmallows to put them safely in the center of the mattress, and then moves Roxy's laptop that Karkat has kept since the hospital next to it; he tugs a blanket free, throws it overboard, goes back for the next.

He really should have expected the dildo to tumble out eventually. Yet when it rolls to a stop against his knee in all its silvery glory he can only stare at it.

"Huh."

Okay, does he still have cloth to pick it up with... looks like it all went overboard. Haha. Damn it.

He's being ridiculous, it's not like Karkat uses it in any way that would make it gross or otherwise boundary-breaking to touch. He still uses the bottom flap of his apron as a shield between his fingers and the base.

Really, nothing to freak out about! He lifts it, blasé as hell, and drawls, "Wow, haven't seen this in a while, when I think of how often you forgot it in plain sight, wonder wh--"

" _Give it to me_."

The ladder rattles with a noise like a herd of rhinos over a rickety bridge. Perched on the last rung, Karkat glares at Dave, eyes glowing, wings folded cramping-tight.

"Haha, c'mon, bro, like you care what I... think of..."

Karkat snatches the dildo out of his hand and flings himself straight off the ladder. Dave is left sitting on his haunches, trying to tell himself that Karkat hadn't been wearing an "if I could blush I'd be blushing" face.

Whoa. Um.

Whoa.

Okay, let's not jump to conclusions here.

**@tentacletherapist rose rose you evil fiend from hell *i think hes started actually using it***

**@turntechgodhead Hmm? What could you be referring to?**

**@tentacletherapist NEVERMIND.**

Jesus. Okay he uh. Needs to be doing things now. Things that are _not_ thinking too much about Karkat's private sex life. Because what Karkat does with Dave is _feeding_ , they are not lovers, it is therefore not Dave's business whether he presses that vibrating thing around secret, tempting places he _does not want Dave to touch_.

Jesus.

Dave would be so fine with not touching if he could watch. Or even just know for sure it happens, his imagination can take care of the rest.

Even without any basis whatsoever, apparently. He shakes himself and punches the mattress to wake himself up, and stomps decisively toward the ladder, inasmuch as one can stomp while walking bowed from stupid ceilings.

He makes sure he makes noise to warn Karkat he's coming down, so he has time to hide that thing Dave is _absolutely not thinking about_.

"Okay! Time to get a load of laundry started! You got any clothes you okay never mind I'm retarded. Be back in ten! Have fun with your -- your. Bird watching. Cloud watching. Sounds cool. Yeah."

What sounds even cooler is plunging head first into the laundry machine and washing his shame away with the sweat stains on his used underwear. Yep. Dave is a trendsetter.

As he bends over to gather an armful of bedclothes the dildo draws his eye like a lightning rod. Because it's pretty much erect like one, a metal love pole perched on the window seat right there next to Karkat's hip.

Karkat is sitting with his arms crossed and his chin set down, and the glare he gives Dave is mulish to the max.

"Um."

Dave finishes gathering cloth. A pillowcase flops free because he was doing it like clumsy ass. He bends over again.

"So do you, like, actually--"

"You dropped a sock."

"Fuck." Where is that escaped sock -- aha. He turns away. His face is prickly hot. "Thanks. Found it."

He straightens up by the coffee table with his armful and glances back, mouth open because he apparently has some none-of-my-business-BUT subtype of reverse-tetanus going on here that means his jaw muscles are aching to flap away.

Karkat is still staring straight back at him, arms still crossed and horns aimed at him like he's thinking serious headbutting thoughts. His nostrils are flared in anticipatory outrage.

Dave closes his mouth. Pinches his lips together, rolled inwards. There, no more mouth for stupid. Yep.

"Okay. I'll just. Ten minutes. Yeah."

He makes his escape toward the bathroom, the laundry rolled in a ball against his breast and held like it's his precious children that he almost lost in a flood.

"Uhh I hear you can wash them in the dishwasher if you wanna it's great for germs and I'll be closing this door here behind me as soon as I can figure out how to -- aha, there." He manages to juggle the laundry in one arm so he can close the bathroom door behind him.

Then he goes and hip-checks the laundry closet (it's not a room at this size, sorry) open, and dumps the laundry on the floor, and flops down on his haunches to hide his face in his old sheets.

He is the stupidest motherfucking dweeb there ever was. Look out, coolness, here comes Dave Strider, here to utterly destroy you. Emperor of losiness. Lose attitude. The person who cool goes to to die.

Blurghghghruuuuuuuugh.

Still in a crouch, he pulls open the laundry machine's door and puts in the detergent, then starts shoveling it all in.

The space is narrow -- long as the bathroom is wide, but only a bit wider than the laundry machine -- and not super well lit either. Dave uses it as a darkroom when he wants to develop his own pictures, which he hasn't done in about six months or a year now and he really should get back to it some day.

Anyway the point is that when the light changes because the door was pushed open, he notices.

"Yeah?" he asks, standing and closing the door with his knee. He fiddles with the settings, head bowed studiously, bangs falling over his face. Jesus, his face is heating up again. He wonders if Karkat abandoned that poor saluting dildo on the windowsill, like a monument to unashamed pervs everywhere.

Vrr. Vrrr, vrrr, _vrrrrrrr_. Badum, badum, laundry on the way, sir. Karkat still isn't saying anything. Did the door just move on its own or what?

He straightens a bit to look over his shoulder.

Two hands close on his hips.

He makes a noise he couldn't describe afterwards. Maybe a yelp, maybe a groan. Embarrassingly high-pitched.

He chokes, hands grabbing for the machine, fingers going white-knuckled on the edges as his knees threaten to dump him on the floor. Karkat is pulling him back, tugging his hips back, bending him over. He tilts Dave's hips. Dave falls down on his elbows. He gasps, a sudden release of breath he didn't control, almost silent but not silent enough.

The walls are so narrow around them. It's so dim in here, it's, it smells of detergent and faded photograph chemicals, developer fluid. The machine is starting to rumble and thump under his forearms, in the space under his chest.

Karkat hauls himself up using his hips as a handle. He drapes his weight on Dave's back, and Dave's knees almost fold once again.

Soft belly against his ass. Armored thighs pressed to the back of his thighs.

Karkat is so warm, even the shelled parts of him. His gauntlet hands still keep Dave's hips trapped.

"Jesus," he chokes. "Jesus." A laugh, not amused at all, because it's a laugh or a whine at this point and he just -- he just. "That's a. Hey. Hi."

For an answer, Karkat snake-rattles against his back, a buzzing counterpoint to the machine's gravelly hum.

"Yeah? Oh, really. That's. Interesting. No, tell me more." He's going to go crazy.

He's expecting Karkat to growl at him to shut up. Karkat doesn't. He pulls himself higher up Dave's back instead, body rubbing hard against his, and he bites the back of his neck.

Dave chokes, and his legs do fold until one of them hits the washing machine. Karkat heaves with his hips and thighs -- startled, awkward, but all Dave really thinks about it afterwards is that he's pinned against the machine and thank fuck for that because if he wasn't he'd end up on his ass.

Karkat huffs in vindicated annoyance against his spine and nips him again.

"Fuck me," Dave hears himself begging, "fuck me, god please, fuck m--"

A hand covers his mouth, light, almost tentative, and he falls silent like a switch has been thrown. It presses a bit harder; he makes a sound in his throat that's strangled and weird and hungry.

"You're so fucking weird," Karkat says against his back, but he sounds oddly pleased about it. Dave still twitches, almost turns his face out of his hand, and then -- doesn't, because Karkat tightened it, pulled his head back, arching his neck.

Pushing him right into the washing machine, which stutters for a couple of beats and then enters another earthquake cycle.

The stimulation is too much, too fast for how all over the place his mind is; he jerks right back into Karkat's crotch and his smooth absence of anything to fuck Dave with, and Dave could damn well weep about that right now.

"Hand, shit, _touch me_ ," he groans, curled over the top of the shaking machine. The tip of his dick is brushing against it, through the pants and the fuckstupid goddamned _apron_ ; he goes on tiptoes to avoid contact. Karkat is heavy, draped on his back like a fat, lazy Persian, and doesn't seem interested in doing anything about it.

(Maybe he's not sure what to do. Maybe he doesn't get it. Maybe--)

Maybe he rocks his hips right into Dave's ass and pushes him back so his dick glides across the surface of the shuddering machine.

"You like that," he muses as Dave chokes on a yell.

"No fucking kidding!" Dave spits back, and buries his face between his arms, shuffling his elbows higher so he can cross his arms over his head -- so Karkat's weight can bow his back until his stomach is pressed into the machine. His toes curl ineffectually against the tiles.

No foothold to be gained here, no way to brace, Karkat's weight has him pinned, trapped, and the washing machine shakes and rocks his whole body, indifferent to his reactions.

It's ridiculous how he's going to be pretty much fucked by a laundry machine and a demon who barely even gets why what he's doing is even working at all.

It feels good, and he doesn't even have to do anything, and -- _fuck_.

It's mortifying.

"Jesus fuck, you don't even know why this is hot, you're not even--" he's not even, not _mounting_ Dave, even like this; he's not thrusting, just resting there like he's totally missing the implications of the position he's chosen. "Of course you wouldn't, shit, fucking body instincts--"

Karkat's hand finds Dave's mouth again; his teeth close on the back of Dave's neck. Dave goes very, very still, a bit shocked even though it's not even the first time and he really needs to explain to Karkat when and how he can get away with it because--

"You don't want to talk about my _body instincts_ ," Karkat growls. " _I_ don't want to talk about my body instincts. I have _no_ body _motherfucking_ instincts."

And then he rocks into Dave and if he had a dick he would now be balls deep.

God. Yes.

"Sounds -- ff -- sounds like -- a lie," he manages to say somehow, five or ten seconds later.

Shit, it feels nice all over, warmth and full-body contact and vibrations -- his head is almost in the gap before the wall and there're spiders and he doesn't even care.

And then Karkat's hand pushes its way under him and he _really_ doesn't care.

It cups him in full, balls and all, and he ruts into it for several blind, uncontrolled thrusts, belly pressed heavy against the hard column of Karkat's forearm.

"So much cloth," Karkat grumbles against his shoulder blade. A tingle runs down Dave's spine.

"Ngh?"

"Apron and pants and underwear? I guess I don't have to worry quite as much about stabbing you in the taint."

Dave smothers a sudden burst of laughter in the crook of his elbow.

That fucking apron. "Kinky housewife roleplay," he manages to choke out between two crazed giggles.

Karkat uses his weight to slowly, patiently rock Dave and his boner into his hand, and goes "what the actual fuck, you humongous imbecile" against his bumpiest vertebra a bit like he's muttering endearments.

"Welcome home, honey, dinner'll be -- ah, hh, _fuck_."

Fucking machine switched gears on him again. His dick might be cradled in Karkat's hand right now but the vibrations still go through him, only slightly muted. Shell? Maybe shell. Yes. Fuck. Dave starts to rock his hips as well as he can, thighs too close to the washing machine to set his feet and brace, and having to move Karkat's weight alongside his to boot.

He grunts or gasps or something throaty and constricted like that when Karkat starts shoving back against him, starts rocking in counterpoint so his thighs impact Dave's ass with each slow, lazy thrust. Karkat is not -- he doesn't have the rhythm down, not quite, but he's doing it anyway and oh fuck, Dave wants him inside, wants himself inside him so badly he sees black holes and dying stars under his closed eyelids.

" _Yes yesyesyes fuck me fuck me please--_ "

"You'd like that," Karkat growls in his ear, breath hot against the bite marks he left on Dave's neck. "You'd like it if I had a stupid protruding pleasure organ and I stuffed it right up your shit chute. It's not even the right fucking hole, you absolute moron."

Face mashed against the washing machine, Dave replies, "Nooo, don't say it like that, s'not hot," and still can't help imagining it and finding it hot as the sun.

What's hotter is when Karkat thrusts against him, and bumps a little harder than he did, probably on accident, and then _grunts_.

It sounded like pleasure. Dave moans. Shit, wouldn't that be nice --

Another. Karkat shifts his weight, thighs rubbing against Dave's as he spreads his knees some, as he -- "Mnh."

Oh. Oh shit, shit, oh yes. Dave frees an arm to feel behind him blind, finds Karkat's bracing arm, the one that isn't cupping him right now, squeezes his hand hard enough to bruise himself on his shell. He tries to pull it under him to hug against his chest but it's awkward and he unbalances them both and then Karkat tugs free, no, damn it --

Then Karkat straightens up until his chest isn't touching Dave's back anymore and he puts his hand back on Dave's hip -- both hands, he abandons Dave's dick like an orphan in winter, growls, "touch yourself," grabs him by both hips and uses them like handles to yank him back into his crotch, as if he --

As if he felt

As if he were _grinding_ against Dave, making quiet little breathy noises almost smothered under the washing machine's rumble, he is grinding, back curving, trying to press closer, and Dave can't push a hand down his pants with the apron in the way so he just grabs himself through a fuckton of layers of clothes and fucks his own grip until his thighs are bruised along the top angle of the machine and he comes.

A washing machine isn't super comfortable for afterglows. He tries to endure, but the vibrations to his spent dick make him want to go on tiptoes to get away, and he has to feebly wriggle in Karkat's grip until the demon lets go and steps back.

Dave doesn't slip to the floor like wet undercooked noodles slopping off a wall but it's a close thing. He manages to brace his hands on the edge of the machine and turns around, props his ass. Wow. Phew.

Karkat has fallen back into a crouch in the narrow space but he's not looking at Dave, he's kind of... Dave isn't sure. Stealth-twitchy, like he wants to fidget but won't let himself, but.

"You get enough to eat?" he asks, voice a little rough from pleasure and sleepiness.

"Yeah, sure," Karkat grunts, dismissive, and doesn't look up at him. He still looks...

Frustrated?

Oh.

 _Oh_.

Wasn't imagining it.

Dave's lips are dry, his throat is a desert. He swallows.

"You uh."

Karkat glares up. Dave slides his ass to the corner of the machine to make space, considers pushing off.

"Want to sit up here?" he finishes, and doesn't manage even a cheap facsimile of casual.

Karkat doesn't move but his wings quiver; he snaps them closed with a twitch, glaring still at Dave, though the frustrated sense of unfairness in his eyes has changed to suspicion, confusion.

"Why the fuck," he starts to say, and then falls silent.

Dave controls his slide into a crouch, his back pressed against the machine, so they're eye to eye, and he waits. He doesn't want to push, can't pressure Karkat, and right now with his body all slow and sated all he wants is to gather him close and kiss his face and fall asleep on him.

That, and for Karkat to feel good, too, the way he made Dave feel good -- or perhaps not that hard, but still to give back a bit of something.

Karkat wets his lips, bites them.

Dave holds out a hand.

"You can use my knee as a stepladder," he says, voice quiet against the rumbly purr of the machine, the soothing swish of the water inside.

"I don't need your hand," Karkat says, once he has already taken it, and eyes him like he doesn't know what the hell he's supposed to do with it now. Dave tugs him closer and sets his legs so Karkat's weight won't wrench his knee.

Then he leans in to kiss his forehead, right between his smaller eyes. "C'mon, get up there."

Karkat growls under his breath, but he climbs, barely resting a fraction of his weight on Dave as he hops and scrambles up.

He turns around to sit with legs dangling where there isn't a wall in the way -- not a lot of choices -- and Dave puts a hand on his knee spur to help himself up and leans in to kiss him on the lips.

"Why do you even--"

"Three, two, one," Dave interrupts, and moves between his knees so Karkat doesn't risk clawing him when the washing machine kicks up again under him and he jerks.

"Holy --" Karkat bends at the waist, breathing in through his nose, for a few seconds before he makes himself sit back up, gingerly. The vibrations haven't abated yet and he's taking his sweet time settling down. Dave watches his face through it and memorizes everything. "Shit. Wow. I -- maybe need a cushion."

Dave cracks a smile. "I'd offer my lap but it would get pretty cramped. Want me to go get you one?"

His demon lifts his head to stare at Dave. "... No, it's fine, I wasn't really -- it was a joke, stupid."

He relaxes when the whirring and thumping slow down, wings loosening; his smaller eyes are almost entirely closed. Dave watches him, a hip canted against the washing machine between his knees.

"Good?" Uh, does that sound arrogant or assume too much... "Or 'okay that's a lot so I can't tell yet' maybe?""

Karkat rolls his eyes at him, though he seems a bit distracted.

"Good. I guess. Mostly."

"Hmm?"

Karkat chews on his lower lip, eyes downcast. "It -- almost hurts. Not _quite_ , but. Why are good feelings and bad feelings so tangled up for you flesh assholes? This is completely illogical."

Dave blinks, briefly stumped. "Uh -- same nerve endings for both? I dunno, man." He rakes a hand through the hair at the back of his head thoughtfully, a bit embarrassed that he has no better explanation to offer. "Do you want to stop?"

Karkat snorts. "You don't need to ask that, when I want to stop you'll know it. Because I'll -- ah." Oh. That face. "I'll have jumped off it. I mean. Yeah."

Dave turns to face him fully and leans in, forehead almost touching his, cups his jaw. He just. He wants. He feels.

"I'm good for now," Karkat tells him, eyes closed and jaw tight.

Dave kisses his face and Karkat is the one tilting his chin up to offer his mouth. They kiss long and slow and Dave thinks about how fast he could get hard again if Karkat showed any sign of wanting them to go at it, but while he sighs into Dave's mouth the pleasure it expresses doesn't... there's no urgency in it.

"How does it feel?"

Karkat headbutts him in the chin, half-heartedly. "Like sexual arousal I fucking guess, how am I meant to tell? Tingly. Kind of like a sneeze. Kind of like nothing else I've felt. I don't know!"

Dave laughs a little. "Okay, yeah, sorry."

They sit-or-stand in silence for another two minutes. Dave is listening to Karkat's breath hitch. It's gorgeous. He can almost measure the slow crawl of his arousal, each and every single surprise sortie and creeping advance.

"Okay, I. Plateau. Kind of. Gonna get off the ride now, move off."

Aw. Dave steps to the side. "You don't wanna, like. Let it climb any higher?"

"No," Karkat barks, and then shudders. "No."

He jumps on the floor, shakes his wings out like they're wet. The first step he takes is a drunken stumble. Dave wants to gather him up and curl next to him in bed, under the skylight where they can just breathe and be.

He follows him out into the bathroom first, and out in the living room, and when he gets under the mezzanine and pats the couch at his side Karkat follows, climbs up and hugs his knees, huddling against the arm of the couch, thighs squeezed together.

"You gonna be okay? Can I do anything to help?"

Karkat blinks up at him like he just woke up and is wondering why he's here, and then says drolly, "You can let me do the laundry from now on."

Dave cracks the fuck up.

"Are you even serious?" he asks between giggles.

"Nah. No. I mean." Karkat sticks a hand into his hair and gives it a good ruffle. He still looks totally baffled, it's so adorable it kills Dave a little bit. "Sometimes yeah? Like I fucking know. But I'm not taking a chore on full time just so I get to ride the magic box, I can do that on my own time."

Pfffffhahaha. Oh baby Jesus, he's fucking perfect, why is he perfect.

"Yeah," Dave capitulates, "okay. But no turning on the machine when there's no load inside."

If he ever manages to do the laundry without popping a boner ever again, he'll be hella surprised.

\--

Nine PM, apartment cleaned, all limbs deliciously sore, apron buried in a closet so deep it will never sashay out again, and Karkat has the remote.

"This is so boring. Skip?"

"Hmm." Karkat makes a show of fishing a single Dorito out of the bag by his claw-tips, crunching it between his teeth, and licking the orange dust off his fingers fastidiously. "Nope."

"It's ads for cars and alcohol and alcohol being drunk in cars, come the fuck on."

"How will you ever find a chain that shows actual programs if you never wait for the end of the ads?" Karkat asks in a display of so much TV wrongness that Dave doesn't even know where to start educating him.

Then Karkat changes the channel anyways, and it's local news. He switches to the next before Dave has had time to even ask.

Probably tired of it, too. They've seen Rose and John's press conference already. Yeah.

No need to check if they're talking about anything else yet. Not Dave's business.

He crosses his arms and oozes sneakily closer to the Dorito bag and also Karkat's pointy shoulder. Karkat isn't awesome to cuddle up to from the side if he's not careful -- spiky! -- but, well.

"Do I have something on my face?"

Dave makes sure he is gazing indifferently at the TV before he goes, uncaring, "what?"

"Isn't that what you're supposed to ask in those cases of what the fuck are you staring at me for?"

Welp. Dave gives in and looks openly at Karkat, who is staring back, slumped into the corner of the couch and his arms crossed over his chest, squinting up at him. His mouth is pinched tighter on he left than on the right, twisted a little. Cute.

Dave opens his mouth in order to be the most suave motherfucker any side of the Atlantic, and his phone rings.

He's been ignoring calls since yesterday. Twitter conversations, sure -- they're public, can't be too full of family secrets and ongoing investigations. He doesn't want to cut all contact, he just wants to not hear about his brother's stupid life decisions right now.

Ain't like anything he says or does will or would have budged Dirk one fourth of an inch, so. Why the fuck should he give himself an ulcer trying.

"You picking up or what?" Karkat asks, and picks up the phone himself, checks the display. "Huh. It's Jane."

Augh. Dave can't ignore Jane. Just... nahh. He'd be worried for his life expectancy. Hell, the only woman in his little group he feels wouldn't make him rue the day he crossed her is probably Roxy. Even Aunt Romy gets a bit worrying sometimes.

Also Jane is like the one other person in this little clusterfuck he feels understands him in full right now. Dave gives in and answers his damn phone.

"Yeah, hi. What's up."

" _Dave._ " Wow, she sounds exhausted. " _Do you want the good news or the bad news first?_ "

He grimaces. "Is this about Dirk? Because yeah, I'm not working on that, conflict of interest and--"

" _Don't be daft, he's still your brother, you have a right to be informed._ "

Urgh. Dave supposes that not knowing something won't make it unhappen. "Bad news, then."

" _Psyche!_ " she says with biting, fake cheer. " _The good news are the same as the bad news. Dirk will **not** be fired for his stunt._ "

"...Huh." Karkat is watching his face, one eyebrow up, but Dave has no idea how to update him. He does feel a hard knot of tension release, but it's not as if that was the only thing he was -- okay, no, he wasn't worrying. Of course he wasn't. Fuck Dirk, seriously. "That's... Okay? Why is it bad news?"

" _Because he set his experiment up in a building full of civilians!_ " she yells into her phone. Dave jumps. " _Because he deserves to be sacked for monkeying around with forces no one fully understands and putting innocent people on the line for the sake of his ego, and he won't be!_ _I'm so **mad** I could run over his foot with my car. I'm mad at him, and I'm mad at me for being glad he's staying onboard after all, and if I didn't love him so much I could wring his inflated head straight off his neck!_ "

Dave blinks slowly at his phone.

"Um, okay."

"Not to mention he dragged a baby off to this plane and caged it in that circle," Karkat mentions, not sounding impressed with the lot of them humans.

"Okay, that is an angle I hadn't considered. How much does it bother Kurloz to be around, though, really?"

"How should we know, when no one's--" Karkat says, and Jane growls over him, " _Who cares about that blasted Kurloz?_ "

"Dirk obviously does," Karkat replies, eyebrows scrunching down.

" _Right now that is not an endorsement!_ "

"Uh, do you guys want I hand the phone off to Karkat and let you talk or...?"

Jane harrumphs into the phone. " _No, that will be all._ " A short sigh. " _Sorry for yelling._ "

"Nah, it's fine." Sigh. Wow, does this conversation make him sigh a lot. He supposes since they've started talking about it... "Anything else? Is he gonna get punished at all, or what?"

" _Two months of suspension without pay is what I heard; there might be more, I don't know. Definitely a black mark on his record. But it's not like we can cut him loose for two months with that creature in his apartment and his rotten habit of **tinkering** , and it can't be moved. So... I don't know how things will go from here._"

"Yeah, hard to supervise his demon time when the circle's in his guest bedroom." Dave is so damned glad he doesn't have to figure that one out.

At least Jane is quieter now, anger spent, though it sounds more like weariness than calm.

"So, uh. How'd he manage the... not fired thing, exactly?"

" _Well he sure as heck didn't grovel for forgiveness!_ "

Okay, never mind, she's angry again. "Oh no," he groans. "Jesus. Don't tell me he was an arrogant dickwad who _had a_ _point_."

" _All demons are inherently dangerous and amoral,_ " she sing-snarls. " _Kurloz was acting according to his nature and isn't any more dangerous if properly corralled, which he will be from now on,_ ** _because_** _I took him in hand! Because if I hadn't, **the Felt would have**!_ "

"Jesusfuck." Dave pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes closed. "Would Kurloz have even _survived_ without him? Wouldn't he have gotten munched instead?"

Jane gives another short, harassed sigh. " _Apparently. The professor they have on call confirmed that it's been known to happen with Rage-aligned demons. They'll just... respawn. I don't know how likely it is, but it was convincing._ "

Dave side-eyes Karkat. "Really? Rage dudes respawn?"

Karkat shrugs noncommittally and changes channels, pretends to be absorbed. Wow, reality TV. Okay, no, it can get pretty funny, especially when... is that a goat. Damn. Dave is missing the show.

" _Alright, I should go. I've got things to deliver to Mister Knows-Better from the station, and then I'm going straight home to put my fish to bed._ "

Dave chuckles into his phone. "Right. Don't forget to give your crab a goodnight kiss from Karkat. Bye, Jane."

Karkat hmphs and turns the sound on the TV back up. "Finally."

"Yeah." Dave reclines against the couch, lets the phone drop onto the armrest. Then he tilts his head to sneak Karkat a look from the side of his shades and smiles a little bit. "I notice you said nothing about the crab."

Karkat heaves an annoyed sigh. "Can I _watch my show?_ "

Bluh. "Okay, okay. Mean."

They watch the show. It's nothing special, people being stupid and gross for no reason, reality TV at its finest. Dave refrains from heckling out loud. If he can't heckle, though, it's actually pretty boring, who'd have thought?

He oozes. He's been pretty active all day; he supposes he can ... relax. Yeah. A spine? Who needs that. He is jello. Jello Strider. It is him.

"Why do you keep leaning so close?" Karkat grumbles, and twitches his shoulder pointedly.

... Ouch. Dave sits back up, crosses his arms. He can't even say he's feeling horny and does Karkat want to feed. Dave doesn't. He's kind of still a little bit afterglowy, even. "I just... C'mon, humans get cuddly sometimes and you're here, is all."

"Cuddly? More like clingy." Karkat huffs, blows dark bangs out of his little eyes so he can side-eye Dave better. "If you don't want to see your human friends then how about you spend some time on your other demons? No, seriously, feed the Time ones at least, if you've got nothing better to do and can't appreciate this masterpiece of absurd comedy."

"It's Who Will Date The Men of Monte Carlo," Dave replies incredulously. Karkat actually turns his head to glare. "... Okay, okay! But do you know how difficult it's gonna be concentrating on Aradia and nothing but Aradia if you're sitting right here?"

Karkat actually throws a pillow at his face. "Then go upstairs! Fuck's sake. What do you even want, don't tell me you want to feed me again, I won't believe you. Your baby tube is just as limp and not even half as energetic as a freshly dug out earthworm."

"...I can't decide if I should feel insulted or laugh," Dave admits after a second of thought.

"You should go upstairs and let me watch my fucking show."

Bleh. Yeah, okay, Dave guesses they got in a lot of togetherness today. And it's not like you can really have privacy from each other in this apartment, unless you want to hole up in the bathroom or the kitchen.

He heaves himself off the couch and gets his candles and matches from the shelf over Karkat's head -- Karkat ducks with a little rattlesnake crackle -- and climbs up to the loft.

It's a bit difficult at first to corral his thoughts, but he's been calling on Aradia for a long time and he falls back into it eventually. Pretty much like meditation, the way the seasons turn and how it feels when winter gives away and the air warms, fresh green leaves unfold...

He's not very surprised when she pops up toward the end. It's not like she visits every time he pays her retainer, but... well. He could kinda feel her tickling at his brain meats in real time instead of just his memory of her.

_Hey, Dave!_

_Hey Aradia. What's shakin'? Getting in lots of good eats? What does a demon even do for fun?_

_Haha wow, you **are** bored._

Dave gives a mildly offended mind-pout, face impassible. _You say that like I never call you up just to chat. So mean. I thought we had a real thing going here._

_Of course we do, Dave! All my real things are important to me._

_You cad. Admitting you're juggling my affections so callously._ She laughs in his head. Dave sighs. _You're a pimp._

_Shh, it's okay, you're at least my third favorite bitch._

Dave snorts. _I'd better be._

He is so, so, so bored.

_You wanna ride?_

_Sure!_ Aradia oozes closer, until he can feel her looking through his eyes, and he lets her run his hands against his pants to feel the cloth. _Whatcha got to eat? Ooh, ohh--_

"No peppers! Jesus, what's with you guys' obsession with killer foods. I got crackers or chocolate, if you want. The Doritos are downstairs and I don't think Karkat'd share."

_Bluh. I guess tabasco sauce is out too. You suck. Hey, let me have the body for a sec?_

_No throwing me off the mezzanine_ , he cautions, and allows her to lean over the railing, though he makes sure their hands are clenched on the guardrail.

"Hey, Karkat!" she calls out cheerfully. Karkat jumps a little bit, and stares up at the both of them with all his eyes narrowed warily.

"Aradia, right." His frown doesn't lessen exactly but it turns a bit less personal, though he taps the remote pointedly against his palm. "What do you want?"

"You mind if I get Dave to jerk off for m-- _holy shit, no!_ What the hell, 'Radia!"

She pouts in his mind. He shoves himself back, away from the guardrail. Is he blushing? Jesus, he is. What's wrong with him.

Downstairs Karkat is not even answering. Urgh.

"Yeah, actually."

Dave totally doesn't jump when Karkat's head pops up by the stairs. He's looking a bit apologetic, as he looks at Dave in that way that means he's looking through him more.

"See, he's got a limited number of shots per day -- flesh things are so fucking inefficient, I swear -- and I'm not giving my Price to him. So I can't really share those. Sorry. I... guess you could have blood?" He makes an unconvinced moue. "As long as it's not too much of it."

_Hmm... Okay, sure!_

"No, not 'okay sure!' Like, what if I didn't want to bleed myself today, what if I was tired of bleeding myself, what if the doctor told me no--"

"That was almost two weeks ago."

"Human blood doesn't fill up that fast, dude, you of all people should know."

Karkat pauses in the middle of climbing down the stairs, looks him over critically. "You could be topped off more, I guess, but you're full enough for a few drops."

"And what if I don't want to give a few drops," Dave grumps, but Karkat isn't listening to him anymore and Aradia is doing the yay dance in his head. "Aradia, hey, I didn't say yes, remember that?"

"Is he going to knock or what?" Karkat mutters from the floor, muffled. "He's been at the door for--"

The detonation startles Dave so badly he almost takes a header through the window throwing himself away from it.


	23. Chapter 23

It's not a bad explosion, as those things get. Blows the shit out of his hinges, and makes the decorative door panels shudder and fall out of alignment like a linebacker rammed them, but it's a foot that finishes the job of knocking the door down.

His gun is -- stupidly -- all the way downstairs in the gun safe by the door. It's out of reach the second the first man rushes through -- a huge wall of a man, square and meaty -- and then the second man comes in on his heels and Dave gives it up for lost.

Under him on the main floor Karkat starts snarling, steps forward to meet the threat, but there's a machine gun in the first man's hands and Dave can see nothing but the confettied mess it would make of his non-shelled face.

" _Get out of here!_ " he yells, and shoves the half-open windowpane out of his way and swings himself out and onto the ancient straight ladder bolted to the outside wall.

Two men on the fire escape's last landing, just under him; he hears glass breaking. One of them looks up, gun up --

Aradia rushes through him with barely a thought; the gun jams, trigger frozen in time. Dave beats Olympic records of ladder-climbing.

"Follow me!" he shouts with the breath he has to spare -- not loud, but he grabs onto Karkat's Name and refuses to let go. Get out _get out_ Karkat has to get out fucking shit oh Jesus Dave just abandoned him -- he reaches the roof's edge, heaves himself up, scrambles for the corner (almost slips but no time to slip so he freezes the sole of his shoe in place until his momentum has taken him away, a flicker of a spell and then gone.)

He hides behind the slope of his roof and goes for his back pocket and his phone and _he left it on the couch_.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Latula will be here if he needs her but against physical assaults she's useless. He tries to concentrate on Damara -- Jesus bitching shit they're breaking his windows some more, he can hear fighting in there, what's going on? He has no weapon to save Karkat. He needs a fucking weapon stat.

Damara gives him the equivalent of a busy ringtone. Shit.

He belly crawls around the slope, tugs and yanks onto random tiles trying to pull one out, peeks over the edge.

Visualizing what's going on inside his apartment just from the noise is almost impossible, but he strains. There haven't been more shots yet. The struggling noises start sounding closer, like they're fighting on the mezzanine ladder.

There's a guy left on the fire escape to guard it, a tall, stooping guy with what Dave is suddenly certain will be a gigantic under-bite, courtesy of a pistol-whipping in the face some years past. Trace.

It's the Felt.

A heavy thud on the wooden floor, screeching glass, Karkat's inhuman snarls.

Dave grabs onto the dark ruins and lava of his Name and visualizes him coming out through the lower window, and then he drops his brick right on Trace's head.

Karkat bulldozes through what's left of the glass, rattling like a pressure cooker about to explode. The Felt is wobbling, a hand pressed against his bleeding scalp, gun wavering. Dave hisses, "Up!"

The ladder doesn't go all the way down to where Karkat is. Karkat solves that problem by leaping as high as he can and sinking his claws in the brick. Dave yanks another tile out and chucks it at some asshole trying to peek out from the mezzanine.

They don't want to kill Karkat, he tells himself with his heart in his mouth, they didn't shoot him earlier inside, they don't want that.

Karkat lizards his way to the ladder and climbs, and Dave retreats fast so he has the space to climb onto the roof.

They came up here that one time on a walk, feels like a century ago, but it was mid-day; now it's nighttime, with only the sodium lamps in the streets underneath to halo the way with faint yellow. He drops over the edge onto the lower, flat cement and gravel roof under there; he already hears the ladder rattle behind them.

They have to cross the whole expanse of it before they can jump over to the next roof. He gets ready to dash.

Karkat lands beside him like a sack of potatoes and Dave blinks at him -- he's holding his cell phone in his mouth. "I need fucking pockets!" he snarls as he thumbs through his phone, clicks something, and lobs it at Dave.

Oh. The panic button app. Good demon, best friend. Dave shoves the phone in his pocket and they take off running.

"Dented the fucking casing -- was brand new--"

They're in the middle of the roof when a flash of light arcs overhead and blinds them when it comes crashing down onto the roof. Dave blinks spots out of his eyes and oh. Oh, fuck. One of the spots slowly resolves into three men, a small, blond, smiling one in the middle. The other two have him by the shoulders.

Okay. Something of Light. Probably Heir. That's Clover, alright. He's going to be a pain in the ass. More or less than Machine Gun Guy, though, Dave can't tell yet.

Dave steps back, slightly to the side. They can't climb back to the apartment from here, even if it wasn't taken over by the enemy. The ground is far enough on this side that he'll break a leg at best. But there's traffic in the street, not a lot but enough to deter them. He hopes.

A quick, squinting glance confirms that the last two assailants are set up on his apartment's slanted roof in prime sniping positions. Fucking -- argh. This isn't _fair_ , it was supposed to be a cuddly domestic evening, this shouldn't be allowed.

"So I notice you guys haven't shot us down yet," he says casually, still stepping slooowly back toward the edge of the roof and trying to decide if there's any way out that isn't a straight-up jump over the edge. Jane or Jade won't let him become a paraplegic, but they can do jack shit if he dies of internal bleeding or head trauma before they get here.

"We care jack shit about you," the guy with the machine gun -- what's his nick again, Dave can't even remember his real name right now -- replies. It's hard to tell in the dark but Dave feels like his eyes are on Karkat.

"So then what--"

"Hey. You. Demon."

Karkat rattles his spines, teeth gritted. Dave tries to remember the schematics of the guy's weapon, all the weapons he got to see, to jam them with the least effort, the smallest moving piece. (The thing with Aradia's magic is it won't stay jammed indefinitely either. He'll have to time it just right.)

"Dead is second best after captured," Machine Gun tells Karkat, "so we don't want to kill you that much. But if you don't come along nicely we'll just shoot him in the head."

And then both Dave and Karkat will die.

No.

He is not letting him go. No.

Karkat has gone stiff; his eyes glow in the dark, crimson highlights dancing on his nose, shining off the lick of armor over his cheekbones.

"I--" He looks up at Dave, and he looks -- trapped. Anguished.

No.

"What do you want with him?" Dave asks, like he cares to know, like it might change his mind.

"C'mon, you don't think we'd tell you!" the blond kid says.

From behind on the roof Trace calls out, bored, "He doesn't, he's trying to buy time."

The kid snickers. "Wow, haha, good luck with that -- ow."

Machine Gun Guy just elbowed him in the ribs. Cute, squabbling, what an adorable team feeling. They take him so seriously, wow.

Then again he _is_ pretty much weaponless, and all the leverage is on the other side.

"All playing for time will do is piss us off," Machine Gun Guy growls.

"Yeah! 'cause all the cops on call are at your bro's place right now!"

For not even a second Dave thinks they mean Bro, but how do they even think he relates to--

Dirk. Kurloz.

Jane. Jane was going there. Was she still there when they attacked? Did they catch her unaware as she walked in? She's -- no, she'd heal herself, heal anyone, he's not going to worry, they'll be fine. They're a good team, they have support.

Dave and Karkat don't. By the time anyone manages to divert a police car and get here it'll have been at least ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and a lot can happen in ten minutes when one of the sides is loaded for bear.

He doesn't know what Karkat is going to choose, is the thing.

Dave doesn't want him killing people who aren't actively trying to kill them first. It's in his contract.

So is the fact that guaranteeing Dave's life trumps any other order Dave might give.

Dave likes his head unexploded, but if he lets Karkat go with them he will never see him again. And if that were all, he'd grit his teeth and bear it, but they don't want Karkat to play patty-cake with. The chance that they'd let Karkat live indefinitely and in a state where being alive is _worth it_ is vanishingly small.

"I forbid you to go with them."

It's worthless as orders go. Disobeying Dave will hurt. Getting him killed...

Karkat snorts, quiet, breathless. "Whatever you say."

That's a 'yeah, fuck that' if he's ever heard one.

"Well then," one of the guys on the roof says.

Weapons come up.

Dave grabs Karkat by the quills. Blood slicks his hand. Karkat yowls -- offense, surprise.

_Aradia!_

Laughing, she feeds from him.

Dave freezes everyone's right soles where they are and charges, without a pause to think (stupid, stupid, but surprise is his only weapon).

" _Quarters!_ "

The machine gun is aimed at his face. No time for finesse; Dave and Aradia freeze it en masse.

Machine Gun Guy hits the trigger. Jammed. And then Dave is running up to a huge hulking brute who specializes in beating up people, but at least the guy is now unarmed...!

Flash of light. Clover dematerializes out of his shoes. Machine Gun -- Quarters -- lets the gun drop, pulls out a knife.

Dave dodges the fuck out of him and tackles the third one instead.

Or he would if the guy didn't flash cracked porcelain skin and bent gears, rust and dirt, and then Aradia is yelping in his head and -- Dave is committed, so he hits the guy, but instead of tangling him up and hopefully breaking his leg, they roll, Aradia's hold on his shoe undone. If Dave gets pinned down he's so fucked --

He doesn't even feel the hits. He just knows when the sky lights up red and they stop rolling to flinch because they don't know what side it's from.

Machine Gun Guy -- Quarters -- falls to the ground. The top half of his head is missing.

His hand is clenched on his weapon. Dave is a detective. He detects that Quarters picked it back up, and Karkat took exception.

Karkat goes from a standstill to a gallop in two seconds, a cannonball of spikes and shell. The guy on top of him jerks, up on his knees, fisting his hand in Dave's collar to haul him close bodily and--

"Get 'im to Clover!"

Dave is shoved back. Hands on him. Flash of light -- he's blind. He kicks -- gravel under his feet -- arm around his throat, shoulder lock, no, no, fuck; he struggles, a hand wedged under the guy's arm by instinct and old training so he can't choke Dave out.

He's pushed face down on the ground and he fights and nothing works.

Aradia would take that death as a sacrifice if he froze the heart of the man holding him inside his chest.

He's never used her on anything living before. He's not sure how, he can't concentrate. He chokes, blinks sweat out of his eyes, black breathless stars. Karkat is still standing (breaking that rule must have hurt) still standing and there are snakes of red, glowing -- blood -- flickering around him. It's his attack, it's fine, he's still fine.

Dave wants to tell him to run but nothing will save him when they kill Dave.

"You assholes!" the blond kid yells. Someone -- no guesses who -- kicks Dave swiftly in the ribs. Ow. He's not sure if anything's broken. Thank fuck the guy is still shoeless. "Shit, Quarters -- Trace, can you--"

"Not with his brain vaporized, kid," Trace says from higher up -- probably he's still on the roof. Dave turns his head a bit in the gravel and sees the wall fairly close by.

His couch is just on the other side of it. Maybe his laundry room. He can't believe that was just a few hours ago.

The boulder on his back has got to be the fifth guy, since the kid weighs about the same as Dave or less and would never manage to keep him pinned that hard.

They're not killing him yet, even though Karkat has decided to kill them first.

He's a fucking _hostage_. He's so mad he could scream.

At the other end of the roof Karkat is still trying to hit the other guy, but fur seems to flicker around him and then he dashes and dodges with bursts of inhuman speed that Dave can barely track. Can't close, but Karkat is going to fuck up the roof enough to ruin structural integrity long before he manages to hit him --

Oh. _Oh_.

"Break the roof!" he yells, muffled into the gravel, at the same time as Trace snaps, "Clover, grab him!"

Karkat's red spikes slam into the roof in a wide circle around the man. One second, no more, and it drops out from under him. (It's a storage business underneath.)

Flash of light. Of fucking course. They reappear at the edge of the hole, and Karkat attacks again.

So long as Clover can teleport it's completely useless. Until they run out of roof, or one of them runs out of juice.

He can't afford for it to be Karkat.

He cranes his head as much as he can against the hold. His hair is glued to his forehead with either sweat or blood, he's got a lock barring his eye so he can't see the guy right.

"Last chance to surrender," he says. "Release your demons or I will use deadly force on you."

The meaty guy on his back shoves his chest into the back of Dave's head to force his face cheek-first back into the gravel.

Aradia is purring.

It's actually pretty easy to do flesh, he finds out. He finds the heart of the man on the roof -- the strategist, orders-giver -- and freezes it, just like that. It's a relatively big volume, thick with solid flesh and flowing blood, lots of atoms buzzing around doing their thing until he tells them to pause for a sec.

The only difference is how eagerly Aradia leans into his will.

(If he kills with her, then the power of his victim's death is hers.)

One second, two, three, ten, and Dave is struggling with the man on top of him, who's trying to choke him out anew. Dave is fighting to keep his hold on his power, come on, another second, he can hold on, he has to.

Something heavy lands with a meaty thud behind them. Dave can't see him, but the noise is clear. The man on top of him jerks in surprise, almost wrenches his neck (Dave's muscles hurt) and Dave manages to catch a glimpse of the body, sprawled out, tremors kicking its feet, spraying gravel.

Good.

 _I think that'll do it!_ Aradia chirps, eager. Dave lets go all at once.

The body stops shuddering.

The guy on top of Dave says nothing, does nothing, apart from watching. Dave figures out why when the almost-a-body lights up in deep red scars that were pink and shiny a second ago and they all start bleeding again.

 _Foul!_ Aradia yells. _Damn it. Hey, hey, can I have the next one?_

Yeah, she totally can, except Dave is dizzy with lack of oxygen and the hit to his reserves wiped him out. _Can't_ , he says, thinks, swears.

If he pulls on Karkat again -- but what if Karkat needs that power now -- how did he even do it again?!

Trace pushes himself up on his hands, sits, wipes gravel off his face. His nose is broken. The look he sends Dave is...

"Okay. We're done. Kill him."

Dave is vaguely aware that Aradia is going _uh oh_ , but he can barely hear his own thoughts behind the blood pounding in his skull. His ears are buzzing and his vision gets dark and he can't tell if it's the restricted blood flow.

It doesn't actually matter.

He goes for muscleman's heart this time, barely wonders how many years he is going to lose. The man does a full-body flinch over him, sways, but his grip only goes tighter, desperate. Dave holds onto the spell. With everything he has, he holds on.

In a corner of his hazy vision he sees the dark shape of Trace leaning in, pulling something out of Boulder Man's pocket. It gleams. Dave knows that one.

 _Yup, sure is a gun,_ Aradia says from very far away.

He's not sure how he manages to jerk the man forward until his meaty body topples on top of him. Probably wrenches something in his back. Now he's a turtle with two tons of meat for a shell, he kicks, pushes. He needs to back up flush against the wall so Trace won't go around to shoot, win two seconds, one second, any second at all.

Not shot yet, his nerves sing as they wait for it, not shot yet. He can't see, can't breathe, buried under dying meat that shudders and kicks and --

The arms around his throat go slack.

He's learned better. He doesn't let go yet.

He thinks people are yelling out there but it's dulled, far away. He thinks it's Karkat.

He's going to suffocate under here.

More yelling. The dead body on him sways like a sumo heaved against it, and drops back on him. Sumo must have given up. Black stars burst under Dave's eyelids.

He's not sure afterwards if it's actual lights he's seeing, or just fancy oxygen-plz brain sparkles.

 _...real lights, bro_ , he thinks he hears. Hey, Latula. Cool. Long time no see. Hear.

Uh, feel? Something.

"--floor, hands behind your head, _now!_ "

Okay wow he really is hallucinating. That's Jade's voice. Jade's 'I can put you on the floor or under the ground, bub' voice. It hasn't been anywhere close to ten minutes. Has it...?

... did she teleport in...?

He breathes. He's still getting squished, but he can breathe, he can -- turn his head, even if his neck hurts, yeah, come on, he can.

Fuck, what if he gets shot.

"He'll forgive me for destroying the apartment," Karkat rasps from some feet away. Dave blinks fuzzies out of his eyes.

Huh. Karkat's crackling. Well, kind of, the way the tendrils weave and branch out around him it feels as if it ought to crack like thunder, but the sound comes when the red tendrils score the roof under him, pieces of gravel rustling and shuffling to fall in the new gouges.

John and Jade stand beside Karkat, John with his back to the rest so he can watch the hole in the roof of the storage building. Huge butterfly wings are fanning from his back. Jade glows a white so cold every single pebble is thrown in stark relief; shadows travel on her skin at a slow glide, making her look alien.

Oh hey, it's the cavalry. They're early, for once.

"No I won't," he says -- or rasps, more like. His throat is swelling.

From the direction they're looking in, Trace is standing by the dead body's feet. Bit close for comfort. No idea where the other two bad guys are, so either they both got hurt falling through the roof -- unlikely, Clover is demon-guaranteed lucky -- or they ran away, or they're about to burst out of the hole for a rescue. He has no clue how close they are to Trace and how pissed off their boss will be to see the survivors come back home empty-handed.

Okay. Did he let the spell go...? He doesn't remember when, but. Yeah. He releases the heart, and it twitches, once, twice, arrhythmic, before Dave loses track of it; the brain has got to be fucked by now...

 _He was delicious,_ Aradia assures him. _You should have taken me harvesting sooner, Dave! This'll pay for **so much**._

Okay. Kill confirmed.

_You could always reuse the meat, if they don't take it away._

Ugh.

He's not sure either Karkat or Jade heard him; hard to project his voice with his ribcage flattened like that. He tugs on Karkat's Name, as light as he can. Karkat's eyes flick to him; his eyes widen briefly when they meet Dave's, and for a second his quills and the blades along his spine sag.

Okay, so what can they--

"I don't think so," Trace says, and aims his gun at Dave's exposed head.

Fuuuck fuck fuck. Dave tries to jam his gun, but he can't get a grip, something slashes at Aradia when she tries -- John is yelling "Freeze!" but he's turned the other way, not Dave's concern when the muzzle of a gun is --

... is turning...

... really tiny?

The strangled chuckle that leaves his throat at the expression on Trace's face is totally involuntary, more than a bit crazed. Trace drops the gun -- Barbie-sized; it gets lost in the pebbles. On Jade's skin the light dies down, just enough to see the long muzzle of a backlit wolf tattoo crawl up her neck and over the corner of her jaw.

It's a lot cooler an effect on Captain Egbert's Celtic knots than on her Three Wolf Moon back piece, Dave has to admit.

"The next thing I resize will be your belt, bucko. Leather, right?" She glares, fierce. "Looks pretty solid."

Did Jade just threaten to cut Trace in two at the waist? God but Dave loves his partner.

Dave braces and heaves, wriggles halfway out, and then Karkat frog-hops the rest of the distance and grabs him by the arm to yank him free. He keeps dragging Dave on the gravel until they're back with Jade, and thank fuck for jeans or his knees would be mincemeat instead of bruised.

Karkat bundles Dave up under him; Dave ends up curled on his side under his plastron, clawed paws surrounding him like a cage. A shelter.

It makes him feel things a bit too warm and liquid for the occasion. "Let me up," he says, coughing to clear his throat.

"Not a _fucking_ chance. And give me permission to kill them already, it fucking hurts."

\--Oh, man. He's been dealing with the backlash all along. Dave needs to fix his contract, if there's a way. He's -- not sure how, or what exactly needs changing, but... "If they won't surrender, or endanger Jade or John or you or me, you can kill them. Now let me up, c'mon."

"No."

"Can't fight if you're --" he coughs; "--brooding me like a hen, dude -- and I can't either, I..."

He's running on empty. Maybe he _should_ stay down, out of the way. What can he do? He's bruised and aching all over, weaponless, down to one demon, and Aradia was just countered by...

 _Aradia?_ he starts asking.

He only gets the backlash from the gust of wind John called up, and not even much of it, shielded by Karkat like that. It's like a slap of air, and for not even a whole second before it dies down he thinks _'he is taking the air from my mouth_.'

Something on John's side goes thump. Dave starts trying to sit up again. Karkat leans back just enough to grab his upper arm and sit him up, stays close, chest to Dave's shoulder, wings spread like the membranes will stop an attack.

"You're too drained--"

"I'm a _sitting duck_ ," he rasps. "We're sandwiched, I--"

Something twinges down his senses, he's not sure what, if he heard or felt it with his hands, his body. Some kind of odd vibration.

The roof is about to come down under them.

 _Oh, that **bitch**. _ Aradia says with ferocious glee. _Use me!_

But he can't, he has no power left and --

Karkat grabs Dave's face between his gauntleted hands, makes Dave face him, and kisses him full on the mouth.

He tastes like blood. When he pulls back there's a second where Dave can see the places Karkat bit through his black lip, beading with a red that gleams odd in Jade's spell-light.

Power, pushing at him, _here I am, **use** me_.

Something is savaging the underpinnings of the roof in a way that has nothing to do with the material world, with the easy permanence of physical things. Something is yanking them toward decay, toward spreading cracks and damp, cement falling to sand, attacking the Time wound into them to--

Aradia surges through him, laughing with such abandon he feels his own lips spread with the force of her grin. They seize the whole roof, bring it to a dead stop; nothing can touch it now, not even gravity, not even that _bitch_.

(No _wonder_ Damara was unavailable today.)

They stand up and it's like his joints really are gears and clockwork, his skin truly the painted metal it looks like; he's up on his feet with a smooth-inhuman jerk, without pain.

He turns around to see which one of them is the Witch of Time. Not that it's much of a mystery -- Clover is Light through and through, the lucky son of a bitch. The scowling, rat-faced man standing with him glares at Dave, skin gone cracked porcelain all over, rusting gears and broken strings showing through the holes in lieu of flesh and nerves.

It's a much more complete effect than Damara has ever showed on him. No bet on the guy being her perfect match.

Barely clearing Class Four, though, or they'd already be dead.

 _We can take them_ , he thinks.

 _One hand behind our back!_ "Hey, Damara!" Aradia calls out, and hoots when the man's mouth twists in tired disgust. "Wanna duel? Loser gets to be dinner!"

She's brimming with power, with the death she just took and everything Karkat is channeling straight into them. Damara sneers.

"Duel is stupid bitch playgame!"

Her power grabs for Jade's heart, for her brain. Aradia and Dave parry without a thought, Dave gliding along on Aradia's awareness of Time like he was always meant to have that sense, like all this time he just forgot to open his eyes.

"To the _side_ ," John sing-songs, jaw clenched, and crowds into them. "We're stuck in a _sandwich_ , this is _not good_."

Oh right. Yeah. Um. "Welp."

Hm. Well.

"Can you _bring_ them flying?" he asks sotto voce. "'Cause if we dodge there's this nice brick wall over there, and then they're all trapped..."

John blinks at him over his glasses, and then bursts out laughing, short and loud. "Oh my god, that's mean, that's so mean. Deal!"

" _Run!_ " Trace yells from behind them. Augh fuck if Clover flashes away again--!

Karkat spears at him with his red attack, and Clover of course just happens to trip and dodge it purely on accident. Fuck.

He does flash away when John's wind comes rushing at them from the back, when the very air picks his friend up and throws him right across the hole in the roof Karkat made. Karkat grabs Dave by the waistband and manhandles him to his other flank; they brace against a furious gust of wind, and Dave, bent double, has to grab at the root of his good wing for a hold so as not to end up on his ass.

The Witch of Time guy passes by rolling like a tumbleweed in the gravel. Dave feels sweetly vindicated.

Thud. Walled.

"Surrender your demons or we will use lethal force!" Jade says, extremely authoritarian for someone whose ponytail has ended up all over her face like a black bush of thorny blackness cosplay.

Dave might be a little punch-drunk. Just a little.

He moves back to John so they can stand in a loose triangle formation, scans the roofs all around for Clover. His method of transport is kind of flashy -- har har -- but Dave was a bit too busy trying not to get bowled over to keep track of where he landed, and if Dave were him he'd be quick to move under the cover of darkness the second he touched down.

"Dave, you good to go?" Jade asks from the side of her mouth. "Gonna need you on the Time one--"

"They're both Time," he says without thinking. He's not sure what Trace is -- either Sylph or Seer, but he pings Aradia's ethereal senses in a pretty _heyyy babe_ way.

Which is frankly kind of gross, but.

"The _one with Damara_ ," Jade grits out.

Figures Jade recognizes her too. They've had some fun partnery times trading her back and forth, after all.

"Got her in my sights, Cap'n," Aradia chirps. Dave is done getting embarrassed about it (he will totally be embarrassed later.) He just shuffles around so he's facing the wall more, waves his robo-fingers hello at the two Felt members over there.

"Count of five!" Jade yells at them, gun up and skin still flaring white. "Four!"

"Dude, your cow tail's ghosting through my ass," Dave mutters to John.

"Three!"

"Umm," John mutters back over Jade, "you know you have this giant wind-up key on your back, right, you perhaps shouldn't talk."

"One--"

"We surrender," Trace says, hands rising in the air.

Dave doesn't believe him until the guy still groaning on the ground releases Damara and her afterimage on his skin dissipates.

 _Poo_ , Aradia says. _Oh well, I'll bite her later._

Jade nods firmly. "Face down on the ground, hands behind your head. Tell Clover to either come join you or fuck off. Dave, handcuffs--"

He goes fishing for them in her back pocket (hello butt cheek of partner.) "Got 'em."

"Give 'em here." She wriggles her fingers. Dave frowns.

Karkat digs his claws into his pants leg, click-chirring in a not super happy way.

Sigh. Dave gives her the handcuffs. Just because he was the target and got thoroughly tenderized... He doesn't even feel it anymore, can't be that bad.

_Uh, yeah, it legit can._

_... Damn it, Latula, can't you let me have my dreams._

_Noppers. Also you gotta let Aradia bounce the second you can, all this syncing ain't doing you any favors._

Urgh. He doesn't want to lose the giddy enthusiasm -- or Aradia's sense of flowing time, either, the way he's aware of it everywhere, of the places where they just need to reach out to bring it to a stop.

He killed a man today. Karkat killed another for him. The Felt is moving against them, violated the safety of their apartment. He doesn't want to have to sit and think about that. He wants to crack jokes with John and strut around with his borrowed badassitude.

Every second of Aradia's time is paid for with Karkat's power.

He takes Jade's gun to cover the suspects as she moves forward with the handcuffs in hand.

Something twangs against the grain and Aradia flinches her -- her sensory tendrils or whatever they are -- back, and then space tears over the slanted roof of his home. For a second he thinks Captain Egbert -- he's got to have Kanaya today, if Jade doesn't.

And then the woman materializes on the roof.

She's tall, dark-skinned -- which means, with the weak light from Jade's skin and the street lamps far down below, that picking up any better identifying features is a lost cause.

Jade raises a hand toward her -- "Identify yourself!" -- and the glow of her skin goes out, just like that, the tattoo of her wolves disappears like it was never crawling all over her body.

"--What the hell?!" John goes. Jade's hands clench into fists at her sides.

"She _left_ ," she says, incredulous. "Porrim _left_."

"Trace," the woman says from the roof, "Report."

"Cans and Quarters are dead," Trace says, bitter and restrained.

The woman considers it for a second -- and John sends a huge gust of wind her way.

Some of the loosened tiles rattle, one falls into the street below; her hat doesn't even shiver.

" _Holy blistered anal thunderfuck_ ," Karkat rattles out. The wind went right through her.

Something of Space. Yeah. Hell.

Does she have a prior contract with Porrim? Be a big coincidence otherwise...

Clover blinds the fuck out of everyone flashing back; he lands on the tiles a little way down from the woman, it's hard to see exactly what's going on with all those spots dancing in his eyes.

"Snowman!"

"Oh Christ on a cracker," John mutters. Dave grits his teeth. Jesusfuck. The mythical second-or-third in command of the Felt, whose existence was never 100% confirmed -- they didn't even know Snowman was a woman, but the shape of her body is, yeah. _Fuck_.

"Snowman, they killed Cans and--"

Space tears again right under their noses and Dave throws himself back, falls to a knee and Karkat is backing into him and snarling and --

\--falling silent.

"The _fuck?!_ " Karkat barks, like he's offended.

"Bec?!"

Jade's dog noses at her insistently, whining. He's still crackling, misted in odd green.

He turns toward the Felt at the bottom of the wall, starts growling. Jade grabs his collar and hauls him back against her leg; he goes, but his ears are flat and he's whining strange, half confused and half angry.

Dave sort of sees when Trace and Damara's guy blink out and reappear on the roof; they're at the edge, he can see them in silhouettes against the sky.

"Right," Snowman says. "We're going."

"Wait! The Knight of Blood!" Trace says, and Dave's insides freeze solid.

If she can blink him off like she just did her guys -- his hand finds Karkat's shoulder spine and closes tight on it; Karkat's arm locks around his knee.

"No," she says after a small eternity. Dave still can't read her body language or her voice worth crap. Is she annoyed, worried, angry? No clue.

"Hey, hold on a minute!" John calls out, offended. "You're under arrest--"

But the lot of them wink out before he can even finish the second word.

Bec's snarls slowly die out. Jade releases him, slow, cautious. When he doesn't disappear again, she takes the gun back from Dave's hand and follows the dog to the base of the wall.

They left the bodies behind. Dave thinks his must have been Cans, since Quarters was the one Karkat got in the head. Bec is currently snuffling at the corpse's stomach.

It's a pretty clean corpse, apart from the unavoidable bowel movement there at the end. Not like Karkat's. He doesn't really want to go look that one in the lack of face.

John sends a gust of wind all around -- trying to locate watchers, probably -- and Jade flickers back on like a lamp on a generator. Dave just...

There's someone's hand on his back pocket. Oh hey, it's Karkat.

"You better not have sat on my phone," he says as he fishes it out, but his tone is odd, he doesn't meet Dave's eyes full on.

Sitting on the roof, he turns his phone on, worrying at his bitten lip. Dave watches him, hands hanging loose at his side. Aradia is slipping from him and he just...

"Who do I... Dispatch? What's the number?"

Oh. Yeah. Calling it in.

"I'll do it," John says gently, and pulls out his own phone. He turns away to call it in; Dave can see his eyes linger on the second corpse sprawled in the middle of the roof.

A soft, human hand touches his arm. Jade leans in, eyebrows furrowed in worry.

"Can you sit down?"

"Better not," he says, and regrets it vaguely when she winces. Too much honesty.

"Can you give me a status update? And Karkat? You okay? Did you hurt your wing again?"

"My wing's fine," Karkat says, and flicks it, dismissive. Dave pretends he doesn't see a wince there at the end. "All clear. That bastard tried to choke him out," he adds. He sounds a bit indignant. Heh.

"Yeah, I... can see that, wow, Dave, nice necklace. I just don't know if Feferi's going to be free yet, I'm sorry, but if Jane--"

She goes quiet all at once.

If Jane needs her more. Yeah. He nods, and regrets it a bit. The pain is starting to come back. His throat feels raw, the muscles of his nape radiate "nope" vibes down to between his shoulder blades, worse on the left side.

"D'you have any info about the situation?" he asks. She shrugs.

"Sorry. We were barely in Dirk's parking lot when Rose all but threw us in the air and told John to haul ass."

Well.

Thank God for Seering sisters, he guesses. Also brothers, because Terezi doesn't do either foresight or farsight; it must have been Kankri.

"Okay, they'll be sending in people as soon as they have enough free to secure the scene," John says. "I'll just... put up some tape..."

He eyes the roof around him with a frown. Yeah, not much to tie it to.

Dave almost offers to help, but then Jade walks him to the corner of the roof, upwind from the corpses, and gets him to lean against the brick. After a long, queasy minute Dave sits cautiously on the little wall that goes around the gravel roof, and says nothing when Karkat pretty much sits on his shoes. Yeah, if he loses his balance... you never know.

His ribs ache. His face aches and stings, his hands are raw in places.

He wonders how much time the roof has before it gives in and crumbles. They stopped it before Damara could speed it up too much, but there's still a big-ass hole in it, and gouges everywhere that probably weaken the whole structure. This is going to cost a lot; Dave hopes everyone's insurance is up to it...

"I _said_ ," Karkat snaps, "get those pebbles out of your hands, fuckface!"

Then -- having deposited his phone carefully on the ground -- he takes Dave's left hand in his, tugs so it's in the yellow light of the street lamps, and uses his claw tips as tweezers. Oh, right. Ow.

It stings. Dave doesn't pull away. His mouth twitches a little when blood wells up and Karkat leans in to flick his tongue at it.

"Don't you need permission to feed from me, bro."

"I'm _cleaning it_. Phbbt." He spits off to the side, eyebrows furrowed in offense. "Dust in blood is fucking gross. What a waste of perfectly drinkable hemoglobin."

"You're gonna give me an infection."

"Good."

Dave watches Karkat's bowed head over his mangled knuckles, dark hair tumbling across his wrinkled nose, eyes doing their glow-in-the-dark thing. He teases out another two or three pebbles. Dave touches his chin with his free hand, brushes a thumb against the underside of his bitten lip.

When Karkat lifts his head to stare at him Dave folds in and hugs him around the neck, wrists slipping between his blades. He presses his forehead against Karkat's shoulder and spends a few seconds just breathing.

He knew the Felt were after Karkat and Kankri since Kurloz. He knew, but he didn't even think about it, didn't plan for them escalating shit, like if it happened in the no man's land it was still just a job to everyone, no hard feelings and let me clock out until tomorrow, I've got a pizza date. He's a fucking moron.

"If you knew what they want from you," he says quietly in his neck, "you'd tell me, right?"

Karkat cricket-crackles right in his ear in annoyance. "Of course I would, I'm not a brain-dead husk of stupid. They don't want to strut down the street with me and brag about the number of double takes and selfies."

"Heh. Guess not." Sigh. He releases his demon, straightens up -- cautiously, his ribs hurt. Urgh.

Karkat is staring up at him like he wants to keep talking and he can't; his jaw is all tight and his nostrils flare every two seconds like a little annoyed metronome.

"Kankri knows, though."

Karkat sighs sharply through his nose. "He as much as told us he does, and can't talk about it. And I'm starting to fucking wonder who even told the lot of you that I even existed." His eyes hood a little, cynical. "Wanna bet Kankri dangled my possible existence under his ride's nose until she thought it was her own idea to go looking for me?"

Jesus.

Karkat _knows_ Kankri, for all that they both profess they spent absolutely no time together in the demon world. But that pompous, awkward windbag pulling one over on Rose? When she's always run circles around him, when she tricked him into revealing himself, into contracting to her--

He can see it, is the thing. "Yeah, no bet."

"And now here I am, a lovely present from your littermate..."

"She wanted Sollux, though."

Karkat glares at him. "How hard did she object, really? Like, do you ever get your way with her when she doesn't _let_ you?"

... Point.

"And Kankri just happens to decide to follow me out here, and as Rose figured out, he was looking for protection from someone we totally don't know is the motherfucking Felt, which is also totally not his previous contractor, but nah, no nefarious plans here. Nope. Oh hey, I really want to follow them home to see what's going to happen. Probably an amusement park!"

He's waving his hand around expansively. Dave pets him between the horns, careful of his quills. He's too exhausted for anger.

Maybe later. Yeah. Definitely. Right now he just...

Mnh.

They sit around silent for another minute, and then Karkat growls to himself and starts picking dirt and things out of Dave's skin. A little while later Dave looks up to voices he doesn't recognize, coming from the roof over them.

"Over here!" John calls, and then has to go and Windy Thing some of the older cops coming through Dave's apartment so they don't break an ankle trying to jump down.

He watches the scene get processed, people bringing in lamps and looking around for evidence, the two bodies -- even the headless one -- being officially proclaimed dead on arrival.

An officer walks up to them, notebook in hand. Dave nods a hello, goes through the routine -- name, badge number, time of the assault, as precisely as he can...

He talks on automatic, dispassionate, bland. He doesn't want to think about what he's saying and colorful metaphors would definitely not help.

"Okay, thanks. You know how this goes..."

"Mm." Well at least his part is done, now. Maybe he can shower and -- oh, no, his apartment is a crime scene. Fuck.

"You're not taking my statement?" Karkat asks.

The officer -- Dave thinks his name is Anangua? something like that -- looks down at Karkat and quirks an eyebrow, looks back up at Dave like they're the only two people in the conversation.

"Oh. Yeah." Dave swallows. Karkat doesn't have a legal standing but they do interrogate kids, when their parents give the okay, and... "Maybe you could do that."

"Sir... He's under contract. His testimony is useless, remember? You could be ordering him to say just about anything."

The man nods firmly to him, and goes to talk to the officer in charge. Dave closes his eyes so he won't have to see Karkat's face.

He knew that. He did. He just... hoped?

Yeah, right. He just didn't want Karkat to hear it from him.

As if Karkat would have forgotten he's --

"Rude," Dave forces out. "He could have looked you in the eye."

He still can't look at Karkat either, Karkat who isn't ranting, who isn't getting angry at the snub -- either the man's words or his attitude -- Karkat who shifts his weight and sits back against the wall, five inches farther, five inches too far to touch Dave.

"Mm."

Fucking shitty day.

"Dave!" Jade calls as she jogs to them, her dog trotting at her heels. "Forensics wants pictures of your wounds, but there's shitty lighting around here. You mind going back inside?"

Why the hell not. He allows her to grab his hand and haul him onto his feet. "So are we parkouring our way down to street level or...?"

"John will pop us over. C'mon. Karkat, you coming?"

"No, of course not, I'm going to let him out of my sight right now, that strikes me as an awesome plan."

They trudge back to the other side of the building -- Karkat limping along awkwardly on three limbs as he's holding his beloved cell phone in his hand and hasn't even tried to hand it back to Dave. John lifts them in the air with a wave of his hand and a long, exhaled "Haaaaaaa!" -- what if he loses the note while they're in mid-air, doesn't he pay in advance usually? Dave really hates flying. He'd probably like it if he controlled it, but being in the grip of someone else's demon... nope.

It doesn't last more than a few seconds before they're on the fire escape, at any rate.

Dave steps across the open (broken) window and climbs down into his apartment and there's glass everywhere, the coffee table was shoved away from its spot and is clawed to hell and back. A pile of CDs is on the floor, some of the cases cracked. All in all they didn't stop to, like, ruin his TV just for fun or anything, so the damage isn't that huge.

It's just dirty. Invaded.

He makes his way around the edge of the room, follows the photographer into the bathroom -- still safe and pristine and he doesn't want any of his colleagues here -- and takes off his shirt, his pants, tries not to grimace when he tilts his head back to show off the puffed up marks around his neck.

Karkat has slipped in with them, ends up in the shower stall so that he doesn't get in the way of the woman, staring with his burning eyes. A few hours earlier they were sitting together on the washing machine.

Dave looks pretty bad in the mirror. There are bruises over his ribs and on his face, there's grime, a few streaks of dried blood.

When the photographer leaves Dave wets a washcloth and sponges himself down perfunctorily. Karkat nudges him aside to get at the first aid kit under the sink and Dave stops him, a hand tugging lightly at the curve of his horn.

"Don't bother, bro, I'll do that once we're where we're going."

Karkat blinks up. "What? We're going somewhere?"

"Crime scene. We're not staying the night here. They'll be busy until fuckall in the morning at any rate. I just..." He shrugs. He wants to be in bed already, but there are so many things to do first. "It'll wait, okay?"

He pops open the washing machine's closet-room. There's a basket of clean clothes there, he left them here because the TV was on and... things. He forgets.

Karkat scowls. "Then I want to take my stuff."

"Yeah, sure. Just tell 'em first so they can note where it all was."

Dave changes clothes, gets clean underwear, a t-shirt to sleep in. He leaves his dirty clothes folded haphazardly on the machine.

Jade is waiting when he comes out. (He sees Karkat's head popping up quickly over the railing to check on him.)

"Alright, you can go for today," Jade tells him. "I'm almost done, so if you want to stay at my place you can wait for me, and we'll drive together?"

"Rather stay at Rose's," he rasps. Fuck, his throat hurts. "Minimize the target area." Also he'll have intel on the Dirk and Jane situation the second she comes home. Perfect.

Also she's in the middle of a pretty active area of town and has fucking awesome wards. Mm.

Jade purses her lips in thought. "Okay. I'll drive you." It's gonna be Dave's car they take, not much choice here, but she doesn't bother saying she doesn't want Dave driving right now. He doesn't care, he doesn't want to drive either.

"'Kay." She turns away, calls Bec from the fire escape, leads him to go around the glass. Dave locates a backpack and stuffs his change of clothes, house keys, and wallet in.

Everything that was on the coffee table and on the couch is scattered across the floor.

"Hey, Karkat, mind calling my cell? I don't see it."

Three seconds, and it trills. He finds it stuck between the couch and the wall.

"Okay, cool. Thanks."

And he's all ready to go. He waits for Karkat to negotiate the ladder with his armful. For a brief instant he's stuck in a moment of perfect clarity where he expects Karkat to turn around and the dildo to poke out of his arms, but--

Oh Jesus shitting dick nipples, it was on the windowsill, Karkat left it on the windowsill. The windowsill that the Felt broke through.

It's got to have been kicked farther into the room. There is no way someone is not going to find it, the second they start lifting the mess up to see what's underneath.

He is never going to live it down. He's tired enough that he mostly feels a muted sense of faraway doom, inevitable, nothing to fight against.

When he spies the base of it peeking out from under a magazine, he violates crime scene etiquette by kneeling down to fix his shoelaces and disappearing it into his backpack.

"Here," Karkat says, handing him the laptop. One of the officers follows him down and drifts by to nod -- your pet demon didn't mess anything up, good, good.

The dildo is lodged at an angle and will not let the laptop slide all the way in. Hffffffuck.

"So..." The officer says, casually polite, as she watches him fight with his bag.

"Hmm?"

"What'd you sneak in here?"

God _damn_ it.

 _Never_ living it down. He's almost tired enough that it makes him want to cry a little. He's just tired enough that he almost thinks, _so what?_ it's confusing to feel both at once.

Karkat looks up, an eyebrow up. "What?"

Dave gives in. The officer is still leaning in close, being discreet, but she's gonna start raising her voice soon.

He cracks his bag open and shows her.

She somehow keeps a straight face. Ish. For three seconds. Then she bites her cheek hard, looks up at his face -- he sees her stopping on the bruises at his neck -- and she softens enough to smile.

"Reasonably sure that's not evidence, then?"

He dredges up all the snark he's got left. "You _might_ say that."

A quiet, sympathetic chuckle. "Okay, Strider, move along."

Saved.

Until he has to go into work at the end of the internal investigation for lethal discharge of demon. Yeah, he is going to take it from both ends on the dildo front, he's pretty sure. He breathes out and quirks her a tiny smile in thanks.

"Hey guys, you ready?" John asks, dropping in through the window. "Because boy, I sure am." Dave has never been so glad to see his toothed face.

Jade excuses herself, rolling her eyes. "Says the latecomer!"

"I'm ready," Karkat says, eyebrows still quirked in puzzlement, like he's not the one at the root of that stealthy little debacle. "Dunno about dumdum over there."

"Born ready," Dave says, and absconds through the exploded doorway.

(He tries very hard not to estimate the price of the damages.)

(In the elevator he realizes the evidence question was the perfect set up to go "You might even say it's my... _intimate conviction_." He huffs a silent laugh through his raw throat. It stings.)

(He killed a man today.)

\--

Rose and Roxy's little townhouse is dark when they arrive. It feels a bit wrong to let themselves in.

He's all over dust, and they have a nice bathroom. He unlocks the door and ushers Karkat in.

John and Jade follow him.

He almost says something. It's late. Thought you were just dropping me off. Don't you have homes to get back to.

He doesn't want to be alone, so he doesn't say anything.

He turns the entry light on and keeps going down the corridor.

"Hey, Meowgon," John says behind him. He sounds like he's bending down to pick up Roxy's black cat before he can get out.

"His name is Mutie! Why do you always insist on renaming their cats!" Jade demands. The door locks.

Dave turns at the stairs and goes up, backpack on one shoulder. Karkat follows, claws ticking on polished wood.

"I'll be fine in Rose's bathroom," Dave says, without much hope. Karkat shuddered enough making his way past the wrought iron gates to know the house is as protected as it can be.

He wishes he'd taken his gun out of the safe. Just after killing a guy, though, that would not have gone over well with the colleagues.

"You'll be fine until you trip over your own feet and drown in the shower drain," Karkat replies, and cricket-hops past him to the last landing.

Dave gives in.

He walks into the bathroom, drops his bag, gets undressed -- shirt off, it aches everywhere; bends to take off his shoes and his ribs twinge.

He lets his jeans and underwear drop to the floor, steps out of them.

Showering would be faster. Some scrubbing, and done. He gets into the tub instead.

He turns the water as hot as it'll go without burning him and reclines, waiting for it to fill.

They almost took Karkat today. (Almost kidnapped him. The way Dave tricked and enslaved him; no, not the same, not for the same goals but he --)

"Are you okay," he rasps, eyes closed.

(Is Karkat still off-balance, still scared?)

(What does he feel about killing that guy?)

Karkat huffs quietly, like he finds that question funny, more in the stupid-unexpected sense than the amusing one. His claws click on the tiles until he steps on the bath mat; Dave can almost feel him leaning an elbow on the edge of the tub.

"What kind of fucking question is that."

"One where I'd hella like an answer," Dave says back. He cracks his eyes open to observe his toes. They're getting submerged.

"I'm -- what do you want me to say? I'm not happy we got attacked. I'm extremely not happy that they're escalating and it'll happen again until either I'm dead or they all are. So what? I'm not injured, you're alive, no neighbors were harmed, what else?"

Dave turns his head to look at him and the expression on Karkat's face kills him a little -- bewildered, annoyed like Dave asked him a trick question.

Lost, too.

"No, I meant in." Dave wets his lips. "In your feelings. Like. I don't know. Shock or... Anything. Bad feelings."

Because Dave feels like that, and he wants to talk about it with someone, and he doesn't want any of his friends to hear it -- it's too much to unveil, too much to burden them with -- and he wants Karkat to tell him he feels the same, wants to be the one Karkat tells things like that.

He's Dave's slave, not his -- not his friend. Not his shrink.

"Never mind. Forget I asked."

Who says Karkat feels so stunned stupid, so empty over any of this, anyway? The first meal of demons is other demons. Ain't no way he hasn't killed to survive before.

"You're brooding," Karkat notes. Dave watches him step into the shower stall and prod at the controls.

"... Yeah, well."

Karkat unhooks the showerhead, blasts himself over the back, the wings, sits to rinse off his legs. He doesn't bother with soap or shampoo, only his shelled parts are dusty. Dave watches.

"You ever kill someone?" he asks. "... Same level as you."

Karkat pierces him with a red look, deadly serious, for a long second before he answers. "You ever give a second's thought to wondering why Blood demons are so rare?"

"Uh. No." Dave blinks. "Low birth rates? ... You're tasty?"

"Mm."

So, both, but not only.

Karkat sits in the shower, ankles crossed, hands casual on his knees. His eyes are so sober, so pensive. Dave stops breathing a little.

"On this plane, not as much -- but back home, we make other demons nervous. They don't like us. They _do_ like eating us." He lifts his chin a little -- he was already looking Dave in the eye but it feels like he's doing it _more_. "It's -- a bit strange. How you don't expect other humans to try to eat you."

"Oh."

"I think I'd only... If I thought they were my friends, if -- if Terezi hunted me, for real I mean, not for a joke, it would bother me. To kill them, I mean." He frowns a little, little eyes blinking in doubt. "Well, there's an element of betrayal there that shouldn't exist for you here, I mean, those assholes were _already_ your enemies... Or maybe it's just the _size_ of the betrayal? Since humans aren't _supposed_ to hunt each other... Hm."

"Huh." Dave blinks slowly. Karkat is doing comparative anthropology. That's... Oh.

The demon blinks, scowls. "Long story short, yes, I've killed people."

His mulish look is a challenge. You gonna take human exception to that?

"Not friends, though," Dave says.

For a second it looks like Karkat wants to get angry, tell him -- Dave isn't sure. Yes he has, he's fearsome and heartless? Of fucking course not, who'd kill their friends? (People who are friends with their food, probably.)

"... No, not friends yet."

Dave doesn't know how long they could have spent looking at each other if someone didn't knock on the door.

"Yeah?"

The door cracks open and Jade peeks in. "Hey, guys. Do you want tea? Or like, hot milk?"

"You guys helping yourselves to Rose's kitchen now," Dave drawls without thinking. It's not like Rose and Roxy would mind.

"I'm not! John is." She shrugs. "He's her partner, he can deal with her wrath -- _Dave_."

He blinks. "Uh. what?"

She pushes the door open in full and walks in. "No, seriously! What are you even doing, that can't be allowed!"

She lobs a little washing glove thing at him. He hurries to drape it over his genitals. " _What?_ "

"You didn't even light a single candle! You can't have a hot bath and not have candles, okay."

She continues to berate him, tone playful and eyes soft, and finds matches.

There are indeed candles in the room (and a loofah, and like, decorative things.) Jade goes around lighting them all. Karkat blinks at Dave like what the fuck. Dave shrugs back, and hunkers down in the tub when she leans across to light the ones against the wall.

Then when she's done she gets a little wooden stool from the corner and sits.

"... Harley, please, I know you yearn for partnertime but my family jewels are kind of bare under this towelette."

"Pffff. Like I've never seen them before. It's okay, zero temptation to thieve here!"

He watches her pick up a box of salts and pour some in the water. "You saying there's something wrong with them? Are you insulting my family heirlooms, Harley?"

"I knew humans were weird but the pair of you are breaking all records," Karkat comments from the shower stall. He restarts the water and resumes rinsing off. Jade smiles at him.

"Need anyone to wash your back, Karkat?"

Dave splutters. "Hey. Hey. No making passes at my demon."

She waggles her eyebrows at him. "I wasn't offering _my_ services."

Dave makes a choked-off little sound that he will deny was trying to be a laugh to the end and beyond. Jade grins, wide and bright, and keeps teasing him, sitting on that ridiculous stool in her t-shirt and gun holster.

She would mow down anyone stupid enough to try it again tonight.

\--

Booboos disinfected, band-aids all over him, he joins the lot of them in the kitchen and suffers being fed hot milk -- fuck tea, it is for herbivores only.

Dave is watching Karkat stuff another spoonful of cocoa powder into his saturated bowl when the front door opens. John is on his feet and has his cup on the table and his gun pointed at the door in about two seconds.

"It's me," Rose says from the front door, out of sight. John holsters his piece with an awkward giggle.

Kankri appears in the doorway first, scans the lot of them and Karkat twice. Karkat kicks John's chair out from under the table without a word.

"Hot chocolate?" John asks.

"I'll have chamomile tea, please."

He climbs into John's chair. Rose finally appears, dragging two more chairs from the living room. She took off her jacket at the door, but like the rest of them she still has her holster on. Dave feels mildly underdressed.

Something in his guts unclenches, watching her. If Dirk were hurt or worse she wouldn't bother with the chairs, she wouldn't look like this. Jane must be fine as well. They're all fine. Everyone lived.

She looks tired, and when she meets Dave's eyes she stares for a little too long before cracking a tiny smile. He quirks the corner of his mouth in return.

She and John sit. "You two are spending the night, then?" she asks John and Jade, who glance at each other and nod. "Good. Roxy stayed with Dirk. Jane, Jake too."

(It's always weird to hear the skips in her speech where "and" would go. He hopes she relearns it fast-ish.)

She looks so weary. So does Kankri.

"I... must say, I'm glad. You two were in time. For a while we..."

Her shoulders slump. Kankri is fiddling with his cup, waiting for it to steep.

"You didn't know it was gonna happen," Dave says, and bumps his foot into hers through the tangle of limbs under the table. "It's fine."

Rose hooks his ankle with her foot. He lets her have it, where no one else will see.

Kankri's brows furrow as he stares into his cup with great attention. "You're right, not until it was already happening." He hesitates, one second, two. "... It shouldn't have happened."

Jade leans in. "Wait, wait. Something blocked you?"

"Something must have!" He looks up at her, still scowling. "I guess it's good to know th--it can't prevent me from being aware of Karkat -- which would be extremely alarming! -- but I couldn't see Detective Strider at _all_ , and that's not right."

They sit in silence for a moment.

"You monitoring your brother's human, Kankri?" John asks, trying to smile. Kankri huffs.

"I'm monitoring my master's important people!" he blusters. Karkat's eyebrows are up.

John nods. "Uh huh. I'm just saying, buddy, I'm not the one who said it would be alarming."

"I meant that entirely in terms of what it would mean for their blocking abilities. Considering -- well. Considering... things."

Karkat rolls his eyes, and drops a sugar cube in Kankri's cup.

"--I don't like sugar in my tea, Karkat."

"Don't care. You need sugar. Your brain's going downhill. Eat a waffle or something."

Kankri scowls at him, lips pursed, cheeks just a little puffed up with all the words he can't find to tell Karkat off.

"You're our early warning system. Maintain your fleshy hardware, okay? You need to be able to tell me where they are if we want me to kill them properly."

Dave and Rose find themselves smiling at each other for some reason.

\--

John makes waffles. Dave eats a waffle. Karkat eats three, bullies Kankri into matching him. It's two-thirty in the morning.

Jade draws first watch. Dave doesn't remember discussing the fact that there would be a watch, but there is. Okay.

She unloads and reloads her gun. Click, click, clack. Her hands are sure, precise. Ready.

"You boys get to share Roxy's poster bed," Rose decides. Which is fine until Karkat climbs in between John and Dave, because John doesn't know how to sleep with someone spiny, and bitches about it.

"Well, let's just put him in the middle already," Karkat replies, and Dave ends up getting manhandled, bruises and all, and then surrounded by beefcake.

"I've seen pornos that started like this," he muses, staring at the canopy. There's a Nyan-Cat painted up there, running in between fluorescent stars.

"Groooooss," John says, elbow pressed to his, warm alive friendly skin. "Don't make me show you my bondage gear, Dave, you know I will!"

"Good _night_ , Egbert," Dave says, not at all grossed out.

"No, good night to _you!_ "

Karkat thwaps them both in one pillow swing, and then drapes his leg across Dave's bruised knees.

In the room next door there's Rose and Kankri and downstairs there's Jade and Bec.

This is as safe as it's going to get anytime soon. Because the Felt are going to keep coming for Karkat and Kankri. They were willing to openly attack and kill cops for it, willing to show their hand, willing to lose men. They've got a plan and they're moving to fulfill it. They're going to keep coming.

(Not if he comes for them first.)


	24. Chapter 24

"Wakey, wakey, Lord Lazybones the Sleeps-A-Lot!"

Dave comes to already knowing he doesn't want to move. He has it confirmed when he bats his eyes open and his cheekbone twinges, and then again when he tries to lift a hand to push John off him. The jerk is looming over him and grinning with far too many teeth for this hour of the -- oh hey, it's noon.

Dave lets his arm flop down on the mattress. Yeah, abort this shit, all his muscles went so crazy tense yesterday to keep from being strangled and smothered, he's sore even in the places he didn't get hit. He is going right back to sleep.

"G'off, Egbutt," he grumbles, "this princess don't need kissed."

John chuckles and leans closer in. "What pretty eyes you have, your majesty."

Wh -- fuck, where are his shades. He forces his protesting arm to feel around for the nightstand, finds it, doesn't find his shades...

... Ooooh, hell. He slumps back, tries to merge with the bed, eyes scrunching closed. He was _home_ yesterday, he wasn't wearing them.

Thank fuck for that, because wearing them at night on that roof might have gotten him killed for real.

"Davey-poo~"

Dave cracks an eye open to glare. John and his giant teeth are about two inches from his face.

It's pretty hard to miss the way his expression goes from teasing to a mild, baffled quirk of the brow.

"Dave? Look at me, buddy?"

Aw, fuck. Dave looks over the room. Karkat is sitting beside him in bed, laptop on his knees, and looks so completely absorbed by whatever it is he's reading or watching that he isn't even paying them enough attention to mock.

Dave so doesn't want to talk about the faint but unmistakable clock gears circling his pupils like a shitty etch-a-sketch. Nope. He'd been doing fine pretending they didn't matter one bit.

"I don't know, that's a lot of -- ow, fuck -- a lot of commitment, Egbert, I don't know if I'm ready for a big step like that--"

"Dave, stop being bashful, it doesn't suit you at all," John replies placidly.

Dave gives in and turns his head -- oh Jesus his neck hurts. He turns his shoulders with it and his back twinges hard instead, so it takes him a couple of seconds to bring himself to meet John's eyes. (This time it isn't even because he's trying to avoid it.)

John peers at him for another two seconds, and then goes "Huh. Yeah, Rose has them too."

Then he straightens up, puts his hands on his hips, and says "Now get up, we're having lunch!"

Karkat looks up from his laptop and then starts closing up windows. Dave sits there and maybe gapes a tiny little bit.

"Hey!"

"Hmm?"

"Oh my little Jesus, you humongous dick, I know I underreact to everything but that's because I know you'll make a fuss for me! Is that it? 'Oh yeah, Rose has them too?'"

"I said 'huh yeah'," John rectifies.

"That's even worse!"

Karkat closes his laptop with a decisive slap of noise and knuckles him under the ribs, where he's ticklish. Not in the bruises, those are on the other side, so really Dave is the one who hurts himself jumping when he _knew_ that his whole body is a charley horse waiting to happen.

"I hate you both with the fiery intensity of a hella pissed off phoenix," he mutters, slumped over the very edge of the mattress, one hand over his ribs. "Seriously this phoenix was dating a hellhound that was literally on fire and she left him for, like, I dunno, something cold and I don't even remember where the fuck I was going with this but I really hate the both of you a lot."

"We'll remember that next time you invite us for a threesome," John replies, pursing his lips sternly. "Dad's waiting for you at the station at two sharp, by the way--"

"I'm up, I'm up."

He is... approximately up. Sort of. He's standing on his feet, at least. He's just standing pretty crooked. Everything from the base of his skull to the small of his back is one big pulled muscle. He has pulled muscles he had never felt in his life before and would have been pretty sure he did not use.

"Could have brought me painkillers, fuck, such poor service..."

"Jade has Feferi until twelve-thirty," John replies, and gives him an innocent look.

Dave limps his torturous way out of the door and down the staircase at a hopping, yelping run.

More of a jog.

Maybe a fast shuffle. At any rate, he moves.

"When you trip I will laugh at you," Karkat informs him almost placidly. "And walk on you entirely accidentally."

"Dun care," Dave replies doggedly, without turning his head. "Jade will fix it."

"She might not want to pay an actual whale."

Dave tries to be grumpy about it for a second, and then he's on the landing and offering his fist for a righteous bump, despite the way his shoulder bitched him out.

Karkat pauses on the last step to blink at him in confusion. Oh, right.

"This is where you apply your fist to my fist -- gently! -- in recognition of the righteous comeback you have unleashed."

Karkat rolls his eyes. "Yeah, I'll pass. You've got pus and shit in there, it's gross."

Dave eyes his skinned knuckles. He cleaned them yesterday night in the bathroom but they might indeed be a little infected. Yuck.

"Jade, it's an emergency," he says as he limps into the kitchen. "Karkat won't fistbump me for cause of pus."

She levels a long stare at him over her coffee cup, and then heaves a dramatic sigh and eyeroll and gestures him to the chair next to her.

"Good morning to you too, partner! My, it is nice to see you!" she chirps as she turns to face him.

"Yeah, yeah. Hi. Ow."

Her long dark hair is already starting to wave with underwater currents that don't even exist.

"Feferi is telling me she wants a mantis shrimp," she says, absently but smiling. "Which, I really don't know how we'd keep it contained, but she says it's fitting because Karkat."

Dave blinks. "... Mantis shrimp." Aren't those the ones with the sonic punch? "Yeah, okay, I can see it. Karkat's not the one who's hurt, though."

Jade twists her mouth a little, pensive, eyes looking inwards. "... Then some kind of white fish, she says. Blind cave fish? Honey, I don't know where I'd even find one. Also Dave isn't even blind. How about one of those fighting fish with the long froofy fins -- okay, good. Hang on."

The last bit was for him, Dave can tell. He gives the smallest nod he can and holds out his hand. (It's kind of crazy how many muscles are involved in just lifting his hand. He can trace the weave of them up to his neck and shoulder blade and spine just from the pain twanging through them.)

"Good news, it's all just muscle strain and scrapes and bruises. Hurts like hell, but easy enough to fix."

For a moment when she heals him it's almost like an afterglow, his body so relieved of pain it feels like pleasure instead. At least he's used enough to the effect not to embarrass himself; he used to blush like an idiot when they were teenagers.

"Phone's ringing," Karkat says, and takes off at a gallop. Dave strains, and hears it muffled from upstairs. Whoops, they did leave everything in the bedroom, didn't they.

The healing glow fades in a few seconds; he checks his knuckles, flexes his arms, straightens his back.

"Oh thank fuck. I live. I liiiiive."

Karkat comes back a bit slower, claws going thump-thumpclick on the stairs one by one; Dave leans out of the door (without pain!) to watch him get down sideways on his hind legs, back hunched awkwardly, the phone pressed to his ear.

"I'm getting there, doucheprince, hold your metaphorical douchehorses. I'd like to see you operating staircases with my design--"

He turns at the foot of the stairs and sees Dave just as he drops on his usual four-legged stance

"... It was just yours," Karkat says, and hops to Dave and drops the phone on Dave's lap.

Uh huh. They don't have even vaguely similar ringtones. Dave smiles a little bit.

Jade snickers and shoves a sandwich at Dave along the table. He bites down as he checks the phone display. Oh.

Swallow. "Hey, Dirk."

" _Dave._ " A brief pause that is completely not relief. Dave isn't relieved at all either. Nah. It's not their thing. " _Status?_ "

"Remade anew. Jade is a goddess. I have the best partner ever, fight me."

She snorts and rolls her eyes, but he can see her smiling too.

Dave asks, "How about you guys? Any wounds I should know about?"

" _We were fine_ ," Dirk says. Dave isn't too sure he believes that.

"Oh, really? Considering everything they threw at us, I'm kinda surprised to hear that. I fail at detectiving. Also at kicking ass. An embarrassment to the Strider name, you might say."

Dirk snorts. " _Dave, my apartment is like Fort Knox, except not centuries out of date._ "

"Or they just didn't try as hard."

He expects a snappy comeback, but instead he gets a long pause.

"Dirk?"

" _... Could be. Could be that they could tell early on they wouldn't be getting in, so they didn't bother trying any harder..._ "

"Could be you were the distraction," Kankri says from the doorway in a clear, carrying voice that goes through to Dirk just fine. Dave can tell. Brother intuition.

"I didn't want to say, but," Dave adds blandly into the phone. Dirk makes an annoyed noise.

"My apologies," Kankri adds smugly, "the secondary objective."

" _That is much better_ ," Dirk says just as blandly. " _Is it a seer's knowledge?_ "

"It's a seer's logic and good sense," Kankri replies, and drags out a stool to perch on.

Karkat goes "Pff."

"Do you wish to say something using actual words?" Kankri inquires fake-politely. "Perhaps we could attempt to figure out a few syllables? Alternately I could write you the alphabet and you might try to point and grunt. Now don't be ashamed, everyone has their limitations..."

"Shut your dribbling trap, turdface." Karkat appropriates the chair on the other side of Dave. "And yeah, that was my analysis too. Did they try for you once you and your Master got there?"

"Could you please refrain from using derogatory names?"

Karkat blinks all his eyes, slow and mocking. "Could but won't."

Kankri huffs. "You are ridiculous. And no, they didn't, but to be fair we were surrounded by policemen and their cars and quite safe, as we had the enemy caught between us and Detectives Crocker and Strider."

"That how it happened?" Dave asks his brother.

" _Mm. We'd been defending a while, but the assailants started trying to escape about five minutes after reinforcements arrived._ "

"D'you catch any of them?"

" _...No._ "

"Oh, so we still win," Dave says, and then hears himself and.

Yeah, they sure did. Two body bags. High score.

" _Dave_ ," Dirk says, a little quiet, a little too intense, Dave already wants to not hear it. " _You're a cop. They attacked you in your home, and if I know you at all, you still tried to retreat and warn them first. Nobody blames you._ "

 _I blame me_ , Dave doesn't say, because he's in the middle of the kitchen and Karkat and Jade are sitting right there and he is not whining around them any more than he already does. "I guess. Yeah. It's not like I regret shooting them so much that I'd rather let them get away with offing us, so."

Wow, awkward silence.

"Anyway. How's Jane?"

" _She's okay_ ," Dirk replies, in a tone that means that is the end of it, which means she isn't.

"Dirkie-poo," Dave says. "My favorite middle bro. Do I gotta ask Rose and Terezi over?"

There's a long moment of tense silence. Dave braces.

" _Let me rephrase. She's physically fine and was never otherwise than physically fine, and if you can make her talk then more power to you. In the meantime, she's my partner, so feel free to butt out._ "

\--Whoa. Um. Wow. Dave throws Jade a glance; her eyebrows are like, _way_ up. She quirks them at him and then nods; she's on it. Dave supposes she'll be less clumsy than he is. Plus they _are_ cousins, so.

" _Gotta get back to work. I'll see you this evening._ " Dirk doesn't wait, just hangs up.

Dave sends his phone a nice pointed look, mostly for Jade, Karkat, and Kankri's benefit.

"Today for the what the fuck section of the news..."

"Yeah, seriously." Jade turns to Kankri. "Could you get anything off him?"

"Naturally." He's eating a sandwich, cut into small hors-d'oeuvre sized pieces. "Could you provide payment?"

"Make sure to determine what exactly you're paying for," Karkat interjects. "Bet you what he knows is stuff like whether that other asshole has strong feelings on pizza toppings."

It's gearing up for another sniping battle, but then Rose comes in and she has an armful of Chinese takeout and everyone gets distracted.

(Kankri refuses to even touch the pork buns, pigs being 'so close to sentient beings,' and meat is totally murder, but apparently cows and birds don't count and Rose still ends up with all the vegetarian stuff.)

\--

**bluuuurgh**

 

**okay whats the problem now?? :/**

 

**problem what problem who said there was a problem my life is problem free its smooth sailing all the way down**

 

**and why are you *texting* me dave, youre at work too, i know you are i **drove you here**!!**

 

**and theres the rub**

**im technically in the building**

**but the ia peeps got here early and capn was like yeah imma be too polite as is my wont heres your dude**

**spent like seventy hours rehashing yesterdays shit and NOW im free of their nosy clutches and can chew the fat w/ him and ofc hes busy**

**so im cooling my heels in the waiting room**

 

**so why cant you wait for him to be free in your cubicle with your late reports and things again? :/**

 

**guess i could also wait in my cubicle but**

**jinx**

 

**jinx!!!!**

**aw damn! >:O**

**im noticing a lack of explanation for your slacking ways, you slacking slacker**

 

**meh**

**no reason**

**im just gaining slacker points i dont have quite enough for the slacker crown**

 

**huh. :/**

**so howd the IA thing go?**

 

**it**

**went**

 

**that good, huh D: do they think you uhhhhhh did something wrong?? i cant even imagine what but**

 

**no no**

**just**

**did not enjoy having to reminisce about being buried in mountainous bodybuilder in his death throes is all**

 

**yeah, thatd be bad enough :(((**

***sends shoulder pats of manly partner support***

 

***holds shoulder like a stoic manly man who got his shoulder gently dislocated***

**and plus they made karkat wait outside those jerks**

 

**what? why??**

**hes not a dog okay wtf!!**

 

**it wasnt the dog thing so much**

 

**> :?**

 

**more of the weapon loaded and ready to fire in my hand thing actually**

 

**..... oh right. yeah i guess if you dont know either him or you and or have no reason to trust either one hed look pretty weapony...**

 

**mm**

**also i had to explain latula**

 

**....... did she do anything last night? :/**

 

**no but they had a idk either prince of space or something of mind to make this little summon free zone just in case**

**i mean itd be useless to ask me to take off my gun and my karkat but not stop me from bringing aradia down on their asses**

**and they found her p much inactive but already nested in my brain so**

**yeah hi btw this is my knightly bro shes on a semi permanent rent dealio on my real estate howdyoudo**

 

**..... yeah :X**

**how *did* you explain her? D:**

 

**whats there to explain**

**shes my anti mindfuck insurance is all you know its the kind of stuff you always regret but too late when it turns out you dont have it**

**im just being smart and preemptive**

**also after the kurloz clusterfuck well fuck me twice if you can say i wont have any use for her with a straight face**

**anyway they didnt mind her after all**

 

**mmm**

 

**and its not like karkat was bored out there he had his phone and all**

**hell hes still on his phone now**

**k capn is wrapping up time to explain to him that i dont want no safehouse to cower in & let me get home already brb**

 

**you don't WHAT??? DD: <**

***DAVE*!!!!!!!**

\--

"Come in, gentlemen," Captain Egbert says, holding the door open. He's watching the both of them and Dave isn't too sure what he's looking for. As Dave gets up and walks through the door he keeps his face perfectly neutral, just in case.

Karkat hops lopsidedly after him, on one hand and two feet. They really need to figure out some kind of bag setup for him that he wouldn't shred or bump his various limbs into...

Maybe a fanny pack. With like, a reinforced leather strap. With luck his back spines would take a while to saw their way through it.

Dave is waved into one of the two chairs in front of the desk; Karkat ignores the second, climbs into the armchair in the corner. He curls sideways in it, wings and spines tucked tight so he won't mangle the already worn leather. His back is to the door, his side to the two of them, it surprises Dave a little. He tries to read his face and finds it written in a language he doesn't speak.

He's still not sure how Karkat took to being told to wait outside earlier. If he minded at all. It's got to be boring as hell to be dragged into Dave's meetings. Dave would get out of them himself if he could.

"David," the man says, almost gently, and Dave foregoes reminding him that his name is just Dave and was never more than Dave, because from him it somehow doesn't grate.

It feels like paternal concern. It's not a thing he's used to. He kind of wishes he was.

"How are you feeling?"

Dave is not a teenager anymore, so he doesn't start to casually and coincidentally pick at his pants.

Egbert won't take 'I'm good' at face value, and Dave would rather he didn't ask again. "That's kind of a hard question, boss." He gives a little shrug, looks away. "Body's fine." His mind, now.

 _I could give you the rundown,_ Latula offers, a whisper at the back of his mind. _Might not like the deets though._

He can guess. No. He's fine not having his nose put in his shit where he can't denial it away. _Yeah, thanks, I'll pass._

Silence, for a minute. Egbert doesn't break it either. Dave gets the feeling it's because he doesn't need Dave to verbalize to get an idea of the problem.

"Would you like to make time with the psychologist?"

Dave's stomach muscles tighten, his nostrils flare just a little. He swallows his first answer -- _hell-fucking no_ \-- it'd get the good Captain to go from suggesting to ordering him for sure.

"I'll be fine, sir." He shrugs, a bit self-depreciative, gazes down at his linked hands between his knees. Look at him, he is sincere Dave. "Rose and Jade are keeping a tight watch. It's -- I'll be fine."

He hopes he looks sincere. Because he is. Totally sincere. Yeah.

Captain Egbert scrutinizes him for a handful of seconds, and then sighs and nods, not in a very convinced way.

"You know it's not supposed to hurt, to speak candidly with someone."

Dave snorts before he can stop himself. Shows what he knows. He tries on a smile. "Uh huh."

Egbert sighs, shakes his head. "Just... Don't leave it until too late."

A last look -- direct, serious, and Dave doesn't like that he's not wearing his shades, even though he would have met it anyway. That the man can _tell_ he's meeting that sincerity, taking it in, is embarrassing.

And then he looks past Dave, and he says with the same quiet, serious concern, "Karkat? How are you doing?"

The demon blinks, sneaks him a suspicious look. "That's kind of vague."

"About yesterday's home invasion," Egbert says -- low, quiet, gentle, "how are you feeling?" and Dave stares over his shoulder at some decoration he put up on his wall so he won't catch glimpses of Karkat's face off the side.

He's talking to Karkat like Karkat is one of his men and Dave thinks -- it's not even a thought. It's knowledge. If that man wasn't his captain Dave wouldn't enjoy being a cop. If it's not him...

Fuck, he could ask Dave anything. Dave would be fine with it.

There's no answer for a while; just as Dave starts thinking Karkat's silence is hostile, he grunts quietly.

"Does it matter?" Karkat grumps, but like he's a little hoping it does.

"It does." Softly. "You're a thinking, feeling being. Of course it matters."

"Yeah, in all the ways except the ones that'd change jack shit," Karkat mutters under his breath, but then he sighs, relaxes against the arm of his armchair. "I'm irritated, my brain is stuck in watchdog mode, which is annoying and also I really don't need to look at the donuts lady like she's a Felt plant, and I'm hungry, which doesn't help, because it makes me feel like I've got an even bigger target painted over my chitinous frame than I already do, which makes my trigger even hairier."

His head tilts back until the back of his skull presses against the padded arm, and he sighs, weary, at the ceiling. Dave watches the play of interlocked shell bands around his neck.

"I'm not feeling weird about killing strangers who tried to kill us first, though. Especially assholes who have got a plan to use me and Kankri for who knows what ends. Yeah, I'm not playing, I'm not a toy or a spell ingredient, they can fuck off. The only thing that's weird is that I don't get to eat them. That seems pretty wasteful."

"Urgh. Dude, you don't know where they've been."

Karkat makes a grouchy moue. "Even if we knew where they've been you wouldn't let me eat them."

"You got that right."

Captain Egbert is smiling a little. It makes Dave want to squirm and also to smile back, a tiny, stealthy one. He's an adult and a professional, so he doesn't.

"Well, if you've got concerns, Karkat, you may feel free to bring them to me, and we will try to talk them out."

"Really?" Karkat replies, pointedly dubious, his voice grating, crackling with harsh inhuman rasps. "Because I do have a concern, and it's that we didn't nail them all."

"Oh?" Egbert asks, perfectly neutral, as Dave winces.

Karkat snorts his disdain. "They wouldn't be _coming back_."

"... True."

"I guess now we hope the living ones take it as a warning and decide not to try their luck a second time, but I don't think the guys in charge are going to let it stop them pushing mooks at us. How many are there in that group, anyway?"

Egbert shrugs. "The core group, anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five. They also employ runners and other people who aren't strictly part of the gang but hope to be allowed to join fully if they prove useful. The ones who attacked you were all core members, though, which seems to indicate the leaders think this is a matter too serious to leave to unaffiliated people. Or they might change their minds tomorrow and decide on an overwhelming attack, bring in everyone they can talk into it."

... It's not like Dave doesn't know that.

So now the choice is basically to kill or jail them all, and he doesn't give good odds to jailing them all. Or maybe...

"Give me their boss," Karkat says shortly, still curled up in his chair. He's not hugging his knees, but he's close. "We one-shot him, problem solved."

"Yeah, maybe not," Dave says, still without quite looking at him. "If it's a plan that will bring in serious money, someone else will pick it up."

"Then we kill those too," Karkat snaps. "Can't be easy to set up if it requires Blood demons, or someone would have tried it before. The know-how has to stop after a certain point. People have to start thinking it's not worth the trouble if we kill them _enough_. Give me the order, we'll go right now."

"Don't fucking joke with me, you're half-starved, I'm on administrative leave, you want we go alone? We're not fucking _cowboys_ , we're not gonna cut a swathe through the whole gang with just the two of us! It's not a fucking boss run, we will _die!_ "

They're glaring at each other and Karkat looks as angry as Dave feels. They both twitch when Captain Egbert clears his throat.

"Am I ever glad to hear that, son." He leans in a little, looks at Karkat, who stares back defiantly, jaw tight. "Karkat... First, we don't know who the boss is, not for sure. Second, if we want to act legally, we need a warrant. We need to bring in proof enough to convince a judge to deliver it; if we _had_ that much hard proof, we would be en route right this instant."

Karkat hisses back. "It's not about the law, it's not even about protecting other people, it's about survival now. They're ready to kill us. We waste time pussyfooting around, they'll get us. And _I can't let him die_."

Dave flinches.

He... can imagine why Karkat is angry now. I'mma hobble you right and left, and now don't let Dave Strider die no matter what, okay? But this method won't do, that one either, oh no, you're forbidden to do that...

One of the orders will break at some point, and he knows which. "That's got to be last resort," he says, voice raspy a bit, and doesn't look at Karkat. "We've got other things to try first. Legal things."

"Detective _Strider_ ," Egbert says, frowning. Dave turns to meet his eyes again, only this time it's not something awkward-nice.

"It's not like I can order him to stop caring about my life, sir. It's the cornerstone his whole contract is built on."

He knows Egbert understands, but he hammers it in anyway. He needs it on the table where everyone can see it. Where Karkat can know he sees it, too.

"It doesn't matter what else I tell him to do or not do. When there's no more choice, I'm. I'm not gonna be able to stop him."

"Nice of you to admit the obvious," Karkat rasps, bitter and not soothed. "Fat lot of good it'll do us, once they've boxed us in and are ambushing us like we're stupid cows who went on a walk through a crocodile park. I just hope we both die before they get to use me! That's the only fucking thing I've got left now, the hope that I fail you and die early enough to at least fuck them over on the way out. Stellar. I'm enchanted."

"May I conclude," Egbert says dryly into the ringing silence, "that you are feeling quite frustrated over your current situation?"

"No, of _course_ not!" Karkat yells back, throwing a hand in the air and twirling it like it's got a marionette on it. "I'm happy! Ecstatic! A touch more joy in my life and I'll be pissing out rainbows and barfing sparkles by the mouthful! My shits will come out enshrined in mother of pearl, flowers will spontaneously grow in my footsteps, and the power of my belief in the inherent fairness and positivity of the universe will somehow grow my wings to an actually useful length! I will _fly_ on that belief, _sir_ , I will fly to the moon and back and bring back moon cupcakes and a case of alien herpes!"

"... Who you plannin' to get herpes from, bro," Dave replies after a few dazed seconds. "Aliens still don't exist."

" _Who the fuck cares, I will fuck a moon rock if that's what it takes_."

Dave pinches his lips. Karkat looks exasperated to the max, top eyes narrowed to slits, eyebrows scrunched down hard. Dave tries very hard not to think of him grinding against... yeah okay he can't really go there with his boss on the other side of that desk, but his brain still twitches to try.

"Gentlemen," Egbert says, drier than a desert.

"Sorry, sir."

"Sorry, I guess," Karkat mutters, and turtles down into his seat, shoulders up around his jaws as he crosses his arms over his chest. The chair creaks a little.

"We don't plan to let the two of you go alone," Egbert assures Karkat, soothing now. "You will have backup nearby at all times. And we will set up an operation as soon as possible. They are gearing up to something nefarious and I for one am not planning to wait around for it. Administrative issues might slow us down from the immediate retaliation you would prefer, I know, but that is an unavoidable downside of abiding by the rules and regulations made to protect us all," he finishes, tone firm once again.

"Mngh. Yeah, yeah." Karkat looks away. His hand twitches like he's touching the leather band around his biceps, on his other side, the one that's got his badge. "... Guess I'll wait. For now. Not much of a choice anyway."

Dave slowly relaxes into his seat. He's still sitting a bit sideways and it's not proper, but turning his back on Karkat now ...

"We can, at least, make the situation more secure," Egbert broke into the silence, gently, "Which, I believe, brings me to the security measures."

Oh. Right. Yeah. That part.

"I'd rather stay home," he says, before the boss can start talking safehouses. "Half the apartments in my building are vacant, a team could stay right there."

Egbert blinks at him, mild but surprised. "The place where you already got trapped once?"

Dave's shoulders tighten. "My _home_ ," he grits out. "And as if most places over the ground floor have more escape routes than this. Front door, fire escape, that's pretty much it." A short sigh through his nose. "We could get other stuff ready, if they tried it again. We could -- I can get my bro to come by, set some defensive spells. You've been in his apartment, it's--"

"He's _suspended_ , David," Egbert tell him quietly. "That means his license to practice summoning is suspended as well. We're looking the other way on the Kurloz front, because Kurloz is already summoned and mostly just requires upkeep, but that's as far as we can ignore it."

Dave cautiously says nothing, because he knows Dirk, and Dirk will come at ass o'clock in the morning if he needs it, in ninja garb and full stealth mode, and he will fix Dave's apartment whether Dave gives the okay or not. Laying wards is hard, expensive work, and they were doing some stupid sibling "I'll do it but you have to beg me first" "nah I don't need it bro" rivalry bullshit, but now? Now Dirk _will_ come -- and come to think of it so will Bro, who has zero license to start with.

"Rose and Roxy will do it, then," he says instead. "You know their place is solid, we spent the night there, it was tight. Karkat?"

"By how much it itched under my shell to cross, yeah, the spellwork's pretty strong." He shrugs. "Don't know how hard it would be to redo. Or what good it'd do against another incarnate demon, for that matter."

"It does make a difference whether you're welcome in," Dave tells him. "Though yeah, probably wouldn't stop a Class Four cold. At worst they'd bring the walls down."

"Someone who's willing to bring a wall down to get in, I'm willing to shoot through the head and be done with," Karkat says, draped like a lazy cat on his armchair, eyes narrow.

(Dave is struck, briefly, by the elegance of his body shape, the design of his armored shell. He is so incongruous on old leather cushions.)

"I really can't recommend this, gentlemen. Karkat, your opinion?"

Karkat frowns -- the thinking one, not the angry one -- and looks at Dave's face for a second.

"Be safer if we went?"

"Ideally, no one would be able to find you."

Karkat snorts at that, explosive and wet. "Yeah, except apparently there's a google alert for me-sightings. Kinda fucks with op-sec. Guess when I'm signing autographs I could ask my fans to keep it on the down-low."

Dave snorts. "Diva."

"Jealous plebe."

Egbert coughs pointedly, though he's smiling. "Another advantage of hotels and rented housing is that they would only have a short time to locate you and prepare before you were gone again, but certainly it isn't ideal. I suppose you may also stay with Detectives Lalonde and Lalonde for the duration..."

Dave grimaces. "No can do."

"Why not?"

He's wondering if it's stupid sibling infighting or other cohabitating issues, Dave can tell. Which... Oh lord, if that were only it. "... Let me put it this way, sir, I refuse to feed Karkat under my sister's roof."

Karkat sits up fast. "You _what?_ "

Egbert closes his eyes and sighs, and Dave isn't sure if he's despairing or amused. "Very well. Hotel room, then?"

Sigh. "Hotel room until our apartment is warded? However long that takes."

"Hm. Karkat? Opinion?"

The demon's brows furrow, and he perches at the edge of his seat, long feet planted wide and ready on the floor. "Safer to keep running and hiding, switch hiding spots every day, right?"

Augh. Dave hides a wince. "I guess..."

"But I will be fucked up every hole with broken glass if I let them chase me away." He scowls. "Agree with the dickwad. Hotel until it's warded, and then we're going _home_." He spears Dave with a hard, vindicated look. "And then I _really_ want to review the part of my contract about not killing trespassers."

\--

They catch a ride back to their place with the two Level Three Officer-Summoners Captain Egbert assigned to their protection detail. Dave has a beanie hat on his head, more because it's funny than because incognito; he is riding with uniforms, that's not exactly low profile.

He's in the backseat and Karkat is in the foot well, but he keeps glancing up at Dave, and at the windows, powerless and irritated. Poor dude can't see shit from that angle.

"We're here," he tells Karkat as Officer Morozov starts looking for a parking spot.

Dave would rather use the underground parking but he doesn't have his card with him, so the car disgorges them on the sidewalk some distance away from the front door. He waves at a familiar-looking person who probably lives in the next building over and ambles his way down, Karkat slinking at his side and eyeing every corner grouchily. He can see Rose's car, and he's pretty sure it's Bro's Vespa chained to her rear bumper. Welp. Time to look at his phone for reasons of twitter addiction.

**hey bro im comin up with my bros in law can you make sure you look extra legal or smth plz**   
**if that puppet is in his fuck the police shirt id appreciate if you could lock him up in the nearest cupboard**   
**or chuck him through the window thatd also be cool**

He doesn't get a reply by the time they're cramming themselves into the elevator. Oh well.

No more Keep Out ribbons, and his front door has been repaired -- new door, new hinges; hell, the wall has been redone too, the cement finish is patchy, barely dry, hasn't been repainted yet. He sort of knows why, too -- the magic wouldn't hold if it's still open to all comers. Wow, he's gonna owe someone some money.

It's cracked open. He doesn't like it. He knows Rose and Bro are inside, are the ones who left it like that, and he still doesn't like it.

Officer Sengupta knocks, wary, a hand on her holstered gun. Something flickers like static around her head, and then she nods, even as Rose calls out, "Come in! We're in the kitchen."

It's not like his apartment is awesome at cover. From the front door you see the whole of the main room, and some of the mezzanine; there's only the kitchen and bathroom to hide from people. It's not the best defensible place ever, but damn it, he likes the light here, he loves the ridiculously tall windows, they are _his_.

Kankri is on the mezzanine. Ok, how did he climb there. More importantly, how will he get down again.

The second Karkat sees him he makes his cat/rattlesnake noise, eels between the officers' legs, and arrows for the mezzanine, crossing the room in two long galloping strides.

"...Lalonde," Sengupta says, pointedly ignoring the demon shenanigans, and nods a polite greeting, which Rose gives back. Rose's hands are splattered in... he's gonna go with ink. He just hopes his kitchen table is salvageable.

Half of the floor is still all over dust and footprints and tiny speckles of glass. Bro appears in the kitchen door behind Rose, and he's wearing an apron Dave sure as hell does not own and carting around a broom over his shoulder. It'd look almost harmless if the stance didn't remind Dave of the mock-careless way he holds his swords.

"Right," he remembers to say for the officers. "This is my brother. You here for cleanup?" he adds, a bit doubtful, as he drifts to them.

"Dude, I'm so used to picking up your shit by now, it's like some kind of masochistic reflex. Oh no, little Davey took a shit on my wooden floor, better break out the Lysol."

He sounds casual, but when Dave walks in close enough, he is reeled in by the neck and half-strangled.

"You little turd, coulda called. Hey, Bro, by the way, I haven't died today either! Shit, I'm gonna instate mandatory daily check-in if you keep this up."

He purses his lips at Dave like he thinks he's a disapproving auntie. Dave makes half-hearted clucking hen noises and leans against him for at least a whole half-second before he straightens up and pulls free.

He saw Rose at noon, so he doesn't hug her. He looks over her shoulder and she nudges him back with her elbow to his ribs. Oof.

"Ow, the heck?"

"Tssk. If you disturb my spell I will disturb your hair -- with industrial-strength gel -- until you resemble the unholy offspring of Karkat on Dirk."

\-- Mental picture. Urgh. Bitch. He glares; she smirks. She chose that alternate to 'and' totally deliberately.

And she's still blocking the way. Aw, come the hell on. It can't be that sensitive, can it? Is there something she doesn't want him to notice about the pattern? But he doesn't even know how to read those. Is she sacrificing a lamb over his fridge or what? "... But what if I wanted to eat?"

"I'll give you ten dollars for McDonald's," she says, and pats his shoulder and nudges him off.

And with that he is summarily banned from the preparations. Blurgh. Okay then. He's not going to be signing in at the hotel for another two hours, there's time to pack and then some. He offers to get Rose to get his escort a coffee if they want it, and then lets them set themselves up as they wish, and goes make himself useful.

Bro is damn quick to hand him the broom, he notices.

(Karkat solves the Kankri-and-ladder problem with vigorous application of his foot to Kankri's ass. The landing goes... well, Dave didn't like that poster anyway.)

\--

> **Dave Strider** @turntechgodhead  
>  #springcleaning of fucking course the second youve cleaned is when assholes invite themselves over for an all night party extravaganza
> 
> #springcleaning my apartment was so pretty
> 
> #springcleaning for like four hours #fml #neveragain
> 
> **Karkat Vantas** @cruorguardian  
>  @turntechgodhead BY THE WAY, THE LAUNDRY HAS GONE MILDEWED.

\--

The hotel room is fairly okay, as these things go.

Gray rug, brass bedframes (not fancy, but the bars are unbroken, not visibly dinged), the walls painted that color that isn't even cream or beige but some undecided muddle of inconclusively neither. There's a ratty red chair in the corner by the TV, but at least it's clean.

Two beds. The Force is fine paying for a room to fuck his demon in, but not if they have to be reminded that fucking is explicitly going to be happening. Separate beds means plausible deniability is still vaguely a thing, if you squint a lot and look the other way entirely.

Okay, so maybe the king bed wasn't as cheap.

The second the door is closed, Karkat hauls his laptop bag out of the luggage pile and plugs it, boots it up. Dave got his demon addicted to the internet, good going, Detective.

Karkat doesn't want to talk now. Okay. Dave considers the TV for a few seconds, and then gets his second best camera instead.

"You open the window, I will do mild harm to your dick."

Karkat is sitting on the bed nearest the window, laptop balanced on his knees, and doesn't even look up.

"That's not really a deterrent," Dave lies, on automatic.

But the conversation dies there. It's not dinnertime yet and there's nothing else to talk about.

Dave doesn't have the right lenses with him, but he busies himself taking macro shots of random shit in the room, the pattern of frayed cloth on the chair, the wave-like shape of fake wood laminate curling up on the edge of a shelf. Then he goes for a selfie from a high angle, perched on the bars at the bottom of his bed.

For a minute he almost wants to topple backward onto his mattress and take more selfies while making duck lips and posing sexily. It'd be funny...

He's not feeling it. (Karkat might sneer. Or worse, turn away without saying a thing.)

"Can I take pictures of you?"

"Oh, so _now_ you're asking." His demon sneaks him a glance, all four eyes narrow, cynical.

"No, I mean--" Fuck. "Yeah. I'm asking."

Karkat's eyebrows twitch up minutely under his bangs, but he returns to his screen without comment. "Knock yourself out, I guess."

"You're the most interesting thing in this room," Dave mutters, a justification that sounds stupid the second it's out. Stupidly true.

It'd be true anywhere else.

He circles the bed, snaps shots at various angles. He avoids aiming straight at the face. Karkat isn't paying attention to him and it'd feel like an invasion of privacy somehow.

He doesn't get on the bed. Back crooked, he bends low to take a shot of those long raptor claws spread out on Hotel Chic cheap-ass cotton, the smooth shell, the violently red, so organic tendons.

The pose is pretty boring, though. The composition is complete shit.

He circles between the two beds; Karkat sits hunched in the middle of the mattress, though he can't sag as much as Dave could, with all the armor on his back. It's gorgeously intricate. Dave takes pictures from above, bowed black-haired head and then all those interlocking segments, that line of flicking blades.

His damaged wing still shows the cracks in a puffy texture, though the white of the new shell has been graying out. Dave wishes he had better light; he zooms in close to document it anyway. It's a crack in perfection, marring, sad, gorgeous.

He snaps a picture of a round, human ear with its whorls half-hidden in tousled black waves and matte quills, the brick red of the horn emerging and running out of the frame. Heh. It almost makes his horns look bigger. He lets out a quiet chuckle; Karkat steals him a glance.

"You mind posing a bit?"

"What do you call posing, exactly?"

"I'm not gonna ask you to put a rose in your mouth and bat your eyelashes. Just, like... Can you sit against the headboard and lean back?"

Karkat types for another thirty seconds, and then shuffles backward without a word. His shell clinks quietly when he leans into the brass bars of the bed.

Dave starts firing away as he circles the bed again, then he goes all the way to the door and takes a side view or three. Karkat moves one of his knees up, reclines more, and oh yeah, casual portrait of demon checking on his stock options.

He still vastly prefers the shot of his shoulder and clavicle with the metal bars behind. Now the beigeish wallpaper adds to the incongruousness of him, but at the same time Dave is almost disappointed that it's not something that fits the color scheme better.

He steps back until he's touching the other wall and takes the same picture, only with part of the laptop in the frame. Now it's incongruous everywhere. Cool.

Karkat closes the laptop and leans sideways to slide it down and onto the floor. Dave misses the occasion to take him stretching, the curve of his ribcage --

"Um? If I'm bothering you, I could have stopped, you didn't have to..."

"I was done."

"Oh. Cool."

Dave raises his camera again, hesitates. Karkat is staring at him wordlessly.

He takes a shot, checks it out in the viewer. Yeah. Okay. A lot more powerful when he's looking at you, even otherwise at rest.

"Can you... like... fan your toes?" He rolls his eyes, but he does it. "Cross them? Like -- oh, yeah, that looks nice, love the crisscrossing thing. Uh, not so high, I'm gonna--" He almost snapped a picture of Karkat's crotch. That's... no.

Just. No.

"You're _documenting_ me," Karkat says slowly, still staring at him, hands resting on his belly with his fingers interlaced the same way his toes are. Dave snaps a picture of that, too. "I don't get why."

"It's gorgeous," Dave says, without thinking, but it hurts his throat on the way out. "You're gorgeous. You -- the, I mean. Not just in the 'yeah, you have a cute face' sense. Like. Aesthetically? Your armor bits, they're. I dunno. Elegant? Badass. Both. It's, it's hella fucking artsy, but in a powerful way, not in a pressed flowers and kittens way and. Shit, I could just look at you move all day. It's odd, but it's _satisfying_ somehow, the way you're put together. You're like. I don't know. Armor porn, but alive."

His face prickles. It takes him a few seconds to realize he's gone red, all over, from ears to throat. He busies himself with his camera, fiddling with the settings.

"... Huh."

A pause. Dave's ears feel like burning.

"Are you being even vaguely objective here, or is this your deviant leanings at play again? Not that I'm sure I give much of a damn for the physical appearance of this body, but you're still not a trusted news outlet on that shit."

Dave makes an irritated noise, though he still can't look up. "I'm not saying it's the kind of aesthetic that would appeal to everyone, especially not people scared of spiny things or bare asses or who have a problem with, like, anthro animals because blah blah purity of the human form, never mind demons of any stripes. But you want we put some of these on twitter? See how fast they go viral, shit, you're _living fucking art_ and I will headbutt anyone who disagrees in the nose."

"Hm."

When he sneaks him a glance, Karkat looks like he's contemplating it. Dave feels another wave of heat, thinking of Karkat posing for him, Karkat _exposing_ \--

Not his fucking demon cunt; his body, his pride, his self. Just that. Showing the world that.

"That's pretty objectifying," Karkat says, but he's smiling that faint, sarcastic smile that makes Dave pinch his lips lest he smile back like a tool. "Are you taking more, or are you done?"

"I can stop if--"

"I didn't ask you to." A shrug. He's still staring at Dave. It's strange. It's good, too. He's paying attention, _yes, you exist for me right now_.

Dave takes more. Closer. Farther. Close-ups of the overlap of scales on the side of his ribs, the dip in the bands around his neck that let him bow his head.

The lick of armor over his cheekbone and the unreal eyes over that, all four staring right at him.

He slides down the sheets, reclines farther under Dave.

Faint smile. Teeth. (Dave presses his finger down on the button. He will never post it.)

Dave puts a knee on the bed. Karkat _stretches_ , spine arched, arms over his head.

From the expression on his face, he's taking very detached notes on Dave's response to visual stimulus.

Dave photographs that, the flashes of red between his armor plates and the remote, thoughtful look on his face and the tousled midnight hair on that starched hotel pillow.

He takes the hand casually splayed open on that belly and the armor over that hip and the look on his face, catlike, amused.

Karkat reaches up for him and tugs on his shoulder and Dave goes, on his knees, straddles his thigh and the sight of the folds of Karkat's wing membrane catch him right in the metaphorical ribs, wine in water over wine in water, fragile skin layered until it goes opaque and red. It would hurt, he thinks, maybe tear, if he lost his balance and put his hand on there; core muscles straining, he makes sure he doesn't.

Indulging him, Karkat bends the armored fingers of his hand in a slow wave before the camera, claws glinting deadly, beautifully curved. Dave represses a smile.

"I guess it's a good thing my meat costume just happens to play right into your fetishes. Maybe the incarnating spell took it into account, making it."

... oh.

Dave lowers his camera. Karkat frowns. "What?"

"... Nothing. Pretty sure the spell didn't, though. It's just how you translate."

"Hm." Karkat considers it, shrugs. Quirks his eyebrows at Dave. "Are we going to fuck, or what? I was going to wait until after room service, but I'm too hungry after all."

"... Yeah. Sure."

He puts the camera on the nightstand and leans down.

He makes sure he doesn't think of anything.

\--

In the morning the next day they have a conference call on the topic of the Felt. Dave can't contribute much. He's glad he's being kept updated. Otherwise he sits on his bed and surfs aimlessly on the internet.

Karkat makes him come twice, once when he wakes up and once at eleven, pointing out Dave took a lot out of him to keep a hold of Aradia and he's nowhere near topped off. (Takes them almost twenty minutes for Dave to even get it up. Fifth time in two days, his dick is like 'aw, mom, do I gotta.')

At noon, room service. After he's done eating he fucks around with cell phone games.

Rose and Bro and Aunt Romy (that one was a surprise) don't want him in his apartment. (Like his space wasn't violated enough.) He's got nothing to do, to the point he's even counting the time until three PM, where he bets Karkat will somehow decide he must be recovered enough for another feeding.

He'd rather bleed himself at this point, but then he'd have to explain why.

"Huh."

Karkat hasn't really talked to him for the last couple of hours, apart from 'pass me the salt' and the like. Dave arches an eyebrow. "Hmm?"

"Remember that journalist who stalked us to the dog park?"

Dave sits up, legs crossed. "Oh. Did she finally get back to you for that interview?"

"Just now." He throws Dave a quick side look and pretends to be completely absorbed in something nevertheless boring. Interested in Dave's response? Nah, surely not.

"You wanna meet her?" Dave asks. "It's your choice, I don't care either way."

He would kill for an excuse to get out of the hotel room for a few hours.

Karkat frowns at his screen, unsure. "Would the boss go for that?"

"So long as we get an escort and stick to public places... I'll call him, might have to get directives from the public relations peeps first."

Karkat grunts a careless agreement that totally fools Dave into thinking he doesn't really care. Dave makes the call.

Captain Egbert is busy, and foists him off on the highest ranked person he can find in the PR division, who lists for Dave all the dos and don'ts and then adds a cautious, "if this goes well it could have a pretty positive impact on the community perception of this program."

... Man, if things work out well with Karkat, are they gonna want to try it again? In a couple of years, like, once everything is ironed out? Fuck, Dave doesn't even know if he can recommend it in good conscience. "Yeah, I hope so. Thank you for the tips, and I'll have the journalist contact you for the pre-publication review. Have a good day."

He hangs up. Karkat, grinning, is already typing up a storm.

"I told her we'd meet her today, we're too fucking bored to live, it's hideous. Where do we go though, the dog park? I don't fancy having my ass sniffed by nosy grandpas again."

Dave opens his mouth to say that's not quite how it happened, and then thinks that, hey, close enough, and closes it.

\--

An hour later and they're in a Starbucks. The backup is in a car parked outside; he's paying for their drinks for as long as it lasts, so they're not bitching much.

The inside is pretty big, and not too busy at this hour, and there's a split-level thing going on; the manager had it roped off but when Dave calls ahead to explain, she agrees to let them access the second level.

She ropes it closed after them again and Dave feels a bit like a show biz star. Nope, sorry guys, no sitting in the booth next to the incarnate demon, you'll have to make do with watching him from afar and taking paparazzi shots.

> **#fuckyeahpetdemon omg omg omg @cruorguardian just walked into my starbucks????**

Dave retweets that one and adds a thumbs up emoticon.

"Don't stalk my fans, turdgobbler."

"Pff. Ms. Standish, hi."

She's sitting at a table by the guardrail and she smiles wide when they acknowledge her, though she's not sure who to look at first and the difference of levels between Karkat's head and Dave's is a bit too big for her back and forth to be discreet.

Karkat holds out his hand for a shake. Dave pulls out a chair for himself and sits, shakes as she sits back down. (He doesn't like having his back to the staircase, and he likes being without his gun because he's being investigated even less, but having a bird's eye view of the room is pretty nice.)

"Can I thank you again for agreeing to this interview?"

Dave makes a high school English teacher face. "I don't know, can you? Karkat? Whaddya think?"

Karkat settles into his chair, wings flitting open on both sides of his backrest before they close again. "You can thank me with something to drink. Preferably sugary as fuck. With sprinkles. Do they put sprinkles on drinks here?"

Standish laughs politely. "I don't know, but some have a drizzle of chocolate on--"

"Sold."

"For the love of God keep the coffee levels low," Dave mentions, jaw resting on his fist as he watches his demon and the journalist. "He's never had any."

She is still bottle-blonde and conventionally pretty and forgettably ordinary, and Karkat is still very, very much not, and it's oddly fascinating to see them looking at each other with mirrored undisguised interest.

He wants to take a picture. He didn't bring his camera.

The manager comes up to ask for their order and Dave is pretty sure this is not the usual kind of service they should expect, but he agrees that he doesn't want to leave Karkat alone or have him wander through the three-quarter full room below, so hey.

"Strawberry and crème frappuccino," Standish orders for Karkat, "and can he have a mocha drizzle on it, yes, I'm sure you'll like it, there's more to life than just chocolate all the time, I promise," and Karkat rolls his eyes but seems game enough.

Dave places his order, and they're alone again.

"To start with, would you tell me how you wish to be addressed -- your first name, a nickname, a title? Mister, Mrs., Knight--"

Karkat blinks. "Karkat's fine. Closest to my actual name you can get at. Though someone called me Knight Vantas once, that was pretty alright..."

She nods, makes a little note. "Also, do you have a gender identity or preferred pronouns?"

She has done her homework, looks like. Kankri would enjoy her. Karkat just shrugs again. "I guess not 'it'? I don't personally care about specific mouth noises, but I care what some assholes use it to mean."

"I get you. No preference otherwise?"

"Got used to 'he' but your genders kind of make zero sense to me." A thoughtful frown. "The ass spelunker over there said he decided on male because I had no cleavage."

Dave clears his throat. "Um. That was mostly to mess with Kankri."

It's been a while since he's seen the potential girl in Karkat's face. He remembers he used to find it androgynous -- pretty for a guy, handsome for a woman, generally confusing. But Karkat is too... huh. Okay, now his head hurts.

"Your body type seems pretty male to me," he tries to explain, groping for words. It's not like he's never heard Rose and Kankri holding forth on the topic, but he wasn't, like, paying attention. "And you have a pretty deep voice. And I dunno, you ping as a dude. Looking like that, I'm not sure what you'd have to do before you started pinging as a girl, though, so maybe you're just not either one."

He's not sure why they're wandering onto this topic. That was really not what he was expecting.

Oh, right. "Ah, before we get any farther into it..." Standish looks at him. "The two ground rules; no questions on current investigations, and Public Relations gets to see the article before publication."

She nods. "Yes, of course." She's probably signed the paperwork already. Karkat grunts. "Yeah, whatever."

The manager comes back with their drinks. Dave thanks her, and is a little impressed at how hard she pretends Karkat is just a normal patron. Usually people don't want to get within arm's reach even when they're friendly enough otherwise, but it'd be hard to put the drinks down if she didn't.

Then again, free advertising.

She leaves. Standish waits until Karkat has taken a sip of his strawberry confection to start again. "Good?"

"Hm. I don't know yet. Not bad so far."

She chuckles. She's pretty good at doing the harmless-friendly thing. "Alright, so I have a few questions for the two of you... For example, what is a typical day like? Who gets up first, are there bathroom schedule conflicts--"

Karkat's eyebrows quirk. "You're _interested_ in that sort of stuff?"

"I want to have a more complete idea of the kind of life you lead, so I can represent it properly. It's very likely not even half of the answers you give will make it into the article."

"Huh. Okay." He glances at Dave, who shrugs. "I don't know if either one of us always gets up first. We wake each other up, moving around, I suppose, then breakfast if he's got morning w--"

Dave elbows Karkat and clears his throat pointedly, and tries not to think too hard about what he's going to say, or he'll blush.

" _Right_. I feel I should warn you now before it casually comes up but for Karkat sex is a sometimes food, and pretty much nothing else. It's nothing to get coy about for him, and likely he's going to end up being pretty frank on the topic, but personally I would hella prefer polite euphemisms and leaving some things to the imagination."

She pinches her lips, he's not sure if she's annoyed or about to laugh. "We are not actually the National Enquirer, so that shouldn't be a problem."

Before he can figure out if that was a joke or what, Karkat grumbles. "You don't want me to mention sex, order me not to mention sex. But I don't see what's so interesting about it. Most of the time it's boring as hell. He keeps feeling up my armor," he complains, and Dave makes a face. "Like I can feel anything through it!"

Wow, ouch. Dave groans and lets his face drop in his hand. Standish is cough-laughing in her hand.

"Yeah, this is doing wonders for my ego, I can tell you," he says dryly.

Huh, she's gone on neutral face. Her normal journalist face is already pretty neutral, even when she smiles -- it's the pleasantly professional look, but-- "So Karkat's magical needs are met with...?"

Oh. "He won't give me his specific price," Dave says, maybe a bit drier than he meant. "And as a member of the police force I don't sacrifice animals on ethical grounds. So it's got to be other staple stuff -- blood or sex."

"Plus there's how I can't eat death energy anyway," Karkat continues, but he's looking at Dave like he's not sure why Dave has gone twitchy. Yeah, he's not gonna know why he should care that the journalist thinks Dave fucks his pet demon as a recreational activity.

Blurgh, she's hard to read. She just nods and takes notes. Dave reminds himself he doesn't care what she thinks so long as it doesn't make it into the article, and lets them get on with it.

Daily routine -- it's pretty boring. Dave cooks, unless Karkat is hungry for pasta, or they call for takeout. The one who complains about the TV program the loudest gets to change the station. No pets, don't want any. Dave cleans. Karkat might not be opposed to helping with laundry, even though he doesn't even wear clothes, but 'sometimes he's just that bored'... (Hee.)

"So, pretty ordinary. Detective, you're still taking care of most of the domestic chores...?"

"I didn't bind a Knight to act as a housemaid," Dave replies dryly. "Wow, would that be adding insult to injury."

(Dave could, too. It'd be so easy. He's acting like Karkat is his roommate, but he's not and they both know that.)

Karkat rolls all his eyes, and doesn't meet Dave's. "Thanks so much for that, I am ever grateful." (He is not.)

(Dave is having too many feelings, in too many directions. He should have guessed a stranger coming to poke her nose into their epic tangle would bring it all back up. He pretends he's feeling pleasant and a bit bored and that's it.)

"How does it go when you go outside?"

Oh, an easy one. "Karkat hates cars, never figured out why -- so does Kankri, his Blood buddy."

"The one affiliated with Detective-Summoner Lalonde? Would you like to explain what's so--"

"No," Karkat says, "I fucking would not. Next."

"What do the neighbors think of you?"

"There's no one on our floor so we don't see them much, and also who cares. Next."

Yawn. Dave sips at his coffee and watches Karkat lick the whipped cream off his.

Another five or ten minutes go by where they talk about the internet and Karkat's twitter followers -- Dave, listening, learns that he isn't yet calling them friends, but he has his favorites, people who don't annoy him quite as much, or who he likes getting annoyed at.

(Down in the main room a cellphone flashes at them. He checks it out -- teenage boy, excited. Whatever. From down there the kid will get a sucky view.)

"And now... Detective, I would like to talk with Karkat alone. Is that feasible?"

Huh. Determined face. He glances at Karkat, who has an eyebrow up, but his spine blades are relaxed; he wouldn't mind.

Dave hesitates. Kneejerk, he wants to say no -- he wants to know everything about Karkat and she doesn't get to hear things he doesn't and wow, is that gross and invasive or what.

At the same time... "I can go sit at another table, but we have to stay in earshot of each other," he says, apologizing a little. "Security concerns."

He doesn't want to have to waste more power trying to grab at Karkat's soul directly if someone attacks. It's a perfectly reasonable reason. His superiors would also not enjoy knowing he left Karkat without direct supervision -- though he, personally, really isn't worried.

They feel a little like excuses, even though they're not.

"But I won't say a thing, no matter what you guys talk about. No derailing or interruptions."

Standish purses her lips slightly in thought, glances at Karkat. "It would be good if you felt you could talk freely..."

"I can always talk freely," Karkat replies, matter of fact like it's just a given, like he trusts Dave will not take it away, no matter what. "Unless in case of security concerns, but we're not talking about that. But if it helps, make him give his word he'll keep out of it."

Dave nods soberly. "My name's word on it."

A smile flickers on her face, like she thinks it's funny, and Dave wonders if she thinks he's humoring Karkat, since only Dave's own will holds him there, and so it doesn't truly hold him at all.

Well. She's not wrong either.

He gets up, picks up his drink. He wanders a couple of booths down, sits against the wall, in the corner; he sees less of the room here, and Karkat and Standish not at all, but no one really sees him, either, and he can still track people coming in through the doors. Acceptable as tradeoffs go.

They start murmuring to each other as soon as he's gone.

He tries to think about developing his photos. Won't be hard, the camera he took them with was digital, but he'd like to take some that he could develop himself. Chemical baths, darkness, the little cupboard with the washing machine...

Karkat enjoyed himself there, he did. He does enjoy himself sometimes, he does like Dave's touch some days, in some ways, he lied. Didn't tell the whole truth? Something like that. Why? He doesn't feel shame about it.

Maybe about being made to react, tricked by his flesh. Maybe he didn't want Dave to get a swelled head. Maybe he doesn't trust her that far, but why would _that_ be a mark of trust to him?

"... _not_ handing ... my Price. He's got enough of a hold on me already! ...

"... don't _care_ he doesn't _routinely abuse it_... still has it...

"... I don't see it as abuse anyways, not the way you... be his right... _did_ trick me good and proper, but I can still hate it...

"What's with you guys' fascination with sex, anyway, you can't even feed off the power...

"Okay, you need to table the attempt to make me say the sex part is rape. He tricked my Name out of me, he could eat or twist my fucking _soul_ and I'd have no one but me to blame, as violations go that's worse."

Dave flinches.

" Being in the -- fucking _language_ , concepts won't, but... soul in the palm of his hand... worse.

"... sex part doesn't _hurt_ anyway. He likes it when I hurt him, but I can't do that much... contract gets in the way. Dunno, I don't get it myself. Biology gets messy like that?"

 _You want I turn off the sound for you?_ Latula whispers, sympathetic. Dave shakes his head wordlessly. His face is prickly-hot and his stomach twisted in a little ball of shame and misery and he fucking deserves every second of it.

"All in all, how is it, living in this world?"

"It ... just is? I don't really have a frame of reference here, lady."

"...good or bad overall?"

"Bad."

(Zero hesitation.)

Every second of it.

"... discrimination in the workplace... streets? ...obedience--"

"I'm not free to choose my own battles," Karkat says, and either the room has emptied or he's forgotten to even try to be quiet. "Think about that. I'm a motherfucking Knight and I can't choose my own battles. I get _privileges,_ like sweet foods and my own phone with an internet connection and the opportunity to talk back as much as I can get my jaw to flap on it, and privileges are things _given_ to me at a _whim_ , that could be _taken away_. I'm not free at all. Don't you think that's bad enough?"

Dave doesn't hear her answer; it's an even quieter mumble, embarrassed? Sorry? Something like that.

"Slavery," Karkat says. "... s'okay, I was the one who walked into it... just pisses me off that I did... feel really stupid, but he... call was so _strong_ , the resonance -- most demons would be fine with a setup like this. Habitual riders would jump on the chance, I bet--"

"But _you're_ not. Fine with it. You're not."

_Dave--_

He sips at the dregs of his glass. He's careful; he might choke, his throat has gone so tight. _No. Latula. No._

"... be worse. He hardly controls me at all. I mean, I can't hunt for my own food and I can't leave... not being told to be quiet and polite or to stay in my corner until needed... Body-wise I'm adjusting, though the sensory stuff is still pretty psychedelic and I hate having to shut down for hours on end as my meatware fires off at random, fucking neuron feedback."

A pause.

"Oh, and time being so linear and inflexible is pretty annoying."

The thing is he makes that list so _casually_. Yeah, here is everything that's wrong about being here, which is pretty much everything, but no biggie.

"... things you _like_?"

"Physical foods? Sweet stuff... getting drunk alright while I was doing it but the aftermath made it really not worth it. ... guess the internet is entertaining, though it's also full of pointless stuff and humans being complete incomprehensible freaks. It's nice to be able to talk to people without worrying that if I can do that it means they're also in range to try to bite a chunk out of me," he adds. He sounds wistful. Dave's heart clenches.

Well, then. Internet for the win.

"How is life in the incorporeal plane? ... close friends...?"

Dave doesn't hear the answer, only from the way Karkat's voice has gone all quiet and closed up the answer must not be 'yeah, a ton.'

Or maybe he just said he misses them.

"... just not sociable for a demon, or--"

"I'm _Blood_."

Standish makes an interrogative noise.

"...Never mind."

They talk about demon society for a bit, how they all interact. (Answer seems to be 'cautiously.' Trust is rare, and prized; contracts and respecting agreements are utterly necessary. Some betrayals are acceptable, fair game; some are taboo and will make everyone else turn on you. Also, Karkat is getting frustrated at his lack of words to put on the experience.)

"... was friends with a Class Two for a long while... remember it hung around before I evolved, but it never did. Evolve, I mean. Then again, some don't. It's hard. It hurts. You grow -- some parts of you grow, but some may die... scary. ...friend wasn't smart... always grumpy but... mutual protection, yeah? He protected me more, but I was smarter, knew how to..."

"What happened?" she asks, and Dave swallows the same words. It's not him Karkat is confiding in. Dave never thought to ask. Karkat isn't choosing to share with _him_.

"I ate it."

Splutter.

"Not _bad_ eating!" Karkat protests. Dave hears his chair move as he shifts. "... stagnating, not _thriving_... just happened... Anyway I have some friends amongst the local riders, sometimes we get to chat through their summoners... No, Class Fours. Yeah. It's easier."

Some more chatter about demon interaction. Yeah, less risk of accidental eating with same-class demons, but more risk of being ambushed by acquaintances during the testing-for-friendship phase.

Sounds like Karkat is giving her a basic rundown, with a lot of editorializing about how stupid the human-centric point of view is and how little sense it makes and how the vocabulary is myopic and has the stupidest perspective on reality. Like did you know that on the physical plane you define a Class Four by their ability to hold the whole of a Gate for their territory... and you define a single Gate as "what a Class Four can hold", circular much? It's archaic and really badly defined and what about the supergates, and what about...

"... makes a Class Five, then?"

... Yeah, Dave knows that. A Class Five will... Huh, his cup is empty. Right. Yeah.

A Class Five is, there's only -- people laughing in the room downstairs.

Karkat answers. Dave misses it. Argh. He can't concentrate.

"Do they impose any sort of order on other demons or are they merely bigger predators?"

Okay, that he knows: Class Four, there's one of each alignment per Gate and not more, or not for long. Class Five, there's two per Gate, tops. Dave lifts his cup to sip, vindicated.

Oh, right, it's empty.

"What about the local--"

He watches the cup roll from his hand, cross the table, drop. Plop, on the cushions. Poor manager.

It's not falling any farther. That's nice.

His ears are buzzing.

"Latula," he whispers. _Latula, I can't. Hear Karkat. I can't. I need to. Latula._

_Chill. I'm listening for you. Ain't nothing to freak out about._

_Huh._

She smiles inside him. She feels weirdly shaky. _Hey, do you wanna meditate for Aradia? That'd be dope. You haven't in the last couple days. Maybe she could drop by, say hi...?_

What about the local, he thinks. What about the local. The local what?

He was. They were talking about something. Karkat and the journalist. They were talking about demon society... demon classes?

_Dave, **stop**!_

_But I--_

Her talons come up around his soul and close like a cage.

_Shh. Think about your bodacious Time babe -- oh hey, whatcha gonna do about Damara? She's got to be back on the market, no way her matchey guy can afford to feed her alone. You gonna hold a grudge?_

_... yeah, but..._ He blinks. Something is vibrating hard against his thigh. Where was he? _... Karkat doesn't hold grudges. Heh. Don't get angry, get even... But she didn't. Doesn't. Owe me._

_Yeah, a demon would think it's trippy you're surprised, ain't hardly as if you guys had an exclusivity contract! Haha. You gonna call on her again then? Can't say it'll be scads of fun for me, but it'll keep me from getting bored. One thing I can say about the girl is, she keeps a sister sharp._

_... probably. Need the... Need the punch. The ruin. Rust. I need that. Don't have three weeks to waste looking for a replacement regular, it'd be such a pain..._

"Hey," Karkat barks right in his face.

Dave blinks. Oh, his eyes were closed. "Hm?"

"Your phone's been buzzing for five minutes, don't tell me you're napping through that, what the fuck?"

"... Huh." It is. Was. He checks the display. The person has stopped calling. Oh hey, Bro. Wonder what he wants.

Wonder what he was thinking about...

"Five minutes? I was listening to you guys," he says (Karkat scowls but he had to know.) Dave blinks. "Only I can't remember what you were saying."

Painful things. Things he doesn't want to remember, but does remember anyway.

Karkat frowns. "Demon society? For how much the word fits on it." Dave nods; he heard that part. "What separates each class? Uh, what did we say next..."

He tells Dave something and Dave gets lost in the harmonics of his voice, the rumbly, inhuman undertone, a strangely crickety bass, things like rasping scales.

What is Latula doing.

 _You gotta trust me here, Firetruck_ , she tells him, tense.

His eyes have gone closed again. The booth is nice, padded just right...

"Latula! Something is wrong with that asshole's brain, do your fucking job!"

"I _am_ ," says his mouth. He listens to the way his chest resonates, feels the vibrations. It's easier when he doesn't have to make them as well. "Listen, crabzilla, you need to step off and shut the fuck up about the topic, like, right the hell now. Dave doesn't get to know!"

His eyes are open again but he didn't open them, Latula did. The journalist is standing behind Karkat, mouth open to ask and --

"Get to know what?" Dave grits out, but Latula goes quiet, burrows. The fog around his brain fades; he straightens up, rakes a hand through his hair like that can dislodge her, looks at Karkat. "Get to know what?!"

Karkat is staring at him weird, mouth twisted and eyebrows squinched but not angry.

"Latula," Karkat says, and does the thing where her Name rings through his voice. Dave can feel it pinging. It's nothing as compelling as an actual hold, but it's... a warning. "Tell me what the fuck you're warding against. I can't do my job if I don't know--"

But she says, " _You know_ ," and Karkat's face goes still and then twists into something terrifying (terrified) and Dave can't... Karkat needs his help, needs Dave to -- he can't think--

_Stop fighting me, **please!**_

"... fuck happened for him to be targeted by--" white noise.

"Your--" white noise "--used to know it... I guess Kankri has it now?"

Karkat's eyes are glowing red, and all his spines are up, and when he speaks his voice is swamped in rattlesnakes. "That... fucking..."

"Ah -- excuse me?" the journalist says.

Karkat and Dave both twitch.

"Yeah, sorry," Karkat says tersely over his shoulder, "I think we're done here. Dickweed, how about we go home. Well, to the hotel room but you know what I mean. Strawberry time is over, I'm good to go, c'mon--"

What Latula is doing is the same thing that happened that time with Jade, and he -- is Jade in danger?

...Is Rose? He. He thinks maybe Rose. He doesn't know why he thinks that, he just. _Fuck_. Why can't he _think_ \-- is Latula turning on him? No, she can't --

_Bro, they're tons safer than you are! Rosy-posy ain't set up the way you are, and that's all I can tell you. I promise you the risk is all yours on this one!_

Oddly enough, it calms him down. His hands are clenched -- one on the end of the table, the other one under his armpit, where his gun should be (only he's being investigated for lethal discharge of demon, only they can't keep Karkat in a locker, now can they.)

_... Okay. Okay, fine, I'll trust you a bit longer, but Jesus, how much power over my brain do you even **have**?_

_As much as I need to fulfill my contract, firetruck. My contract that you **agreed to**._

_Yeah, the thing is **I don't remember the particulars worth shit**._

She sighs in his mind. The gigantic, scaly barrel of her nonexistent chest heaves with her breath. _That too, you agreed to._

_... I did **not** think this through properly._

She laughs a little, and then she slithers down deep, and he looks outwards again.

Karkat is standing on his hind legs, a hand on the table for balance, bent at the waist so he can stare Dave in the eye. His jaw is tense; his eyes still glow like a forge.

Dave unclenches his hands and pulls himself up on his feet. Karkat steps back to let him through, but he keeps leaning hard on the table so he can watch his face. Dave stares back, and doesn't know what he's looking for.

Karkat pushes away with a quiet snarl and drops back on all fours. His wings are fanned out, all claws ready.

"Sorry, Ms. Standish," Dave says, and shakes her hand quickly. "Personal matter."

He doesn't want to be an asshole about it. He wants strangers to put their nose in it even less. He holds onto her hand a bit too long, stares over his shades a bit too hard.

"Have a good day."

"You too," she calls as they leave, but it's a rote answer.

They cross the coffee shop at a quick stalk and go find their security detail and go back to another hotel (this one all spring green and sepia, twin beds.) Karkat is a ball of tightly wound anger and the insect staccato in his movements is back in force, click-click-click, every step a precise twitch.

Dave showers for lack of anything better to do and calls his family for an update on when he gets to go back to his home (not today) and then he finds Karkat still watching him with his brows knit and he says, careful around the edges of a waiting Latula, "Dude, you're making me feel like this is even worse than having the Felt after our asses."

"The Felt I can _eat_ ," Karkat says, and then he stalks to him and climbs into his lap and makes sure, with brutal efficiency, that Dave is in no state to ask a thing for the next little while.

\--

He dreams of nothing he can understand, only it's terrible.

He dreams Karkat comes to save him and dies in the bargain, only he's not even sure it's worth it, he's not even sure he survived.


	25. Chapter 25

"Come in, it's unlocked!"

"Am I the only one whose ass seriously chafes at being welcomed in by someone whose place it really is fucking not?" Karkat muses from somewhere down by Dave's thigh.

Karkat is really, really not the only one. Dave grunts at him -- heard you, bro, tired of hearing myself bitch though -- and pushes the front door of his apartment open.

It's clean again, at least, if he ignores the spell patterns traced on every single flat surface.

It's also crammed with people. Both his brothers, his sister and his aunt, Roxy, and then there's the Egbert-Crocker-Harley-English bucktoothed clusterfuck -- minus Captain Boss-man, who probably did not want to see Dirk or Bro blatantly ignore their lack of permits, but plus dog from hell.

His living room is not that big, okay.

Also Bec is currently sniffing at the puppet slung over Bro's shoulder with his hackles halfway up. Dave foresees an interpersonal disaster.

"You're late!" Rose says, amused, as she navigates through to him.

"Do you even know how much paperwork I missed in the last week," Dave replies, maybe complaining a _little_ bit. They'd been cleared and back to work for three days, but between that and everything he missed when he was in the hospital, Dave still isn't done catching up.

At least after today he gets to crash at home instead of yet another hotel room, he supposes.

"Did everyone eat already?" he asks, looking around. John and Jake are wolfing down sandwiches, and Roxy has her hand in a bag of chips.

"Pretty much everyone," Rose says, after she's done scanning the room. Well, fair enough; it _is_ past nine PM. "We'll probably get pizzas afterwards anyway."

"Yeah, okay."

Shit, there are spell curlicues on his _ceiling_.

"The plan is to put a couple layers of paint over it," Rose says, smirking. "Bro bought some already."

"Is it pink or some shit?"

"Sea-foam green! Which will go very nicely with your couch."

Wow. It's not a good safe white either but it could have been orange or a really gross puce; he really must have worried the dude.

He waves back at John and Jake, and stays right by the door. "Rose?"

"Hmm?"

Dave lowers his shades, leans in, looks at her over the edge.

Yeah. Fuck. John was right, her eyes do the same weirdass etch-a-sketch thing his do, only not with square-ish clock gears but with tiny daggers of flame. On her it wouldn't even be noticeable -- no straight-ish lines or right angles -- if the pattern wasn't so regular.

"It was that thing Kankri did with our alignments, right?"

"The eyes?" She nods pensively. "Yes. I'm not sure why. It's here for good, too, but I rather think it was worth it."

Dave considers it for a few seconds, and then shrugs it off. You have to stand closer than arm's reach before it really shows; neither he nor Rose allows people that close all that often. "Yeah. So we get anime eyes, that's fine. Bummed it's not a sharingan though."

She snorts. "Yes, Dave, that is exactly what you lack out of life. A whirling red eyeball with commas in it. Anyway, we have another ten minutes before optimal moon placement, so if you want to go to the bathroom..."

He checks the room. People are still chatting. Aunt Romy is making Jake blush, oh good lord.

Karkat is busy following the edge of the big circle on his floor, big eyes almost closed, little eyes over those wide open. (Dave isn't sure what he's seeing.) Kankri watches Karkat, seated across the kitchen threshold.

Okay, good enough. He opens his front door again and tugs Rose out onto the landing.

"--Dave?"

The door closing behind the two of them cuts off most of the people sounds. It's all quiet and cool and dark out here, the ceiling lights timed out.

"Not asking you to tell me if you do," he says -- his voice gone low, because even now he doesn't want to be overheard, "but do you--"

The door bursts open and light and sound spills out. Karkat glares at him, hanging from the doorknob.

Kankri is peering over his shoulder. Fucking great.

"Come out here and hurry up," he groans. Karkat hisses at him.

"Yeah, thanks so much for the permission, you fucking monument to the glory of dick cheese!" He barrels out between Rose and Dave. Dave stares tiredly at Kankri, who watches the three of them with mild interest.

"Either in or out, Kankri, please, you're not a cat."

Okay, and now several people are watching this clusterfuck play out. Discretion for the win. Kankri decides himself and steps out, his long-ass tail taking three centuries to clear the door. Dave closes it again with a resounding bang.

Great. And now they're just a bit crowded in the corridor.

Karkat stalks toward the elevator, eyes narrow, listens for it, then when he finds it at rest goes to open the staircase door and listen for people again.

Rose turns back to him. "Not asking me to tell you if I...?"

Dave sighs. "Do you know that there's a thing Latula is blocking out of my head? Because if she says I hella shouldn't know, yeah, okay, but I figure _someone_ ought to."

It's hard as hell not to let himself start wondering. He can feel Latula lurking, ready to snap up any thought that drifts too far, and he really hated the way she took him over last time. Demons aren't supposed to do that. Not unless you've severely messed up the contract, but in that case why isn't he long dead? Why hasn't it happened more? Why...

_Hey, hey, Firetruck. Bzzt._

_... Okay._ He concentrates on flowers and butterflies. She laughs a little.

Rose is staring at him, and she's _baffled_.

"... You don't?" Dave says, a little more hesitant now.

Rose tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, and then leaves her hand up there for a beat, slow, hesitant. The gesture is so unsure, it makes him feel weird. Rose always looks like she knows everything, even when he damn well knows she's faking it. It's disturbing when she looks confused.

"I -- you are saying that Latula is keeping something from you? I mean, something -- knowledge that belongs to you?"

"Yeah, either a memory or she's stopping me from making a really obvious connection, I dunno. Karkat knows more--"

"Yeah, and I have to talk with Kankri in private after this," Karkat says malevolently as he comes back to them.

Kankri blinks, arches an eyebrow, and then all his eyes blink and he goes " _Oh_."

"Kankri?" Rose says. "A hint, if you please?"

Kankri purses his lips and gives her a pointed look. "When did your, ah, brother contract with Latula, again?"

Rose blinks, taken aback, and then her mouth falls open just a little bit. "Oh. I -- ah, I don't suppose you can tell us what you don't remember about it..."

Dave rakes a hand through his bangs. He's getting a real-life actual headache from this bullshit, and they still have the warding spell to get through. "Be faster to tell you what I do!"

It's not like they ever really talked about it. They just...

He remembers wrapping himself around her, he remembers her fighting to go back, face all eerie and blank, and then he remembers her crying herself hoarse, sorry, Dave I'm so sorry, I was so stupid, I didn't know, I'm so sorry.

Then he never brought it up again because she was killing herself with guilt and of _course_ he'd come after her and drag her ass to safety, she's his _twin sister_ , no need to make a mountain out of it. And Rose never brought it up again because aforementioned guilt, and he had a new brain demon to get to know, and that vague, oppressive awareness of all the things Latula kept at bay but it was fine, wasn't it, he was safe so long as Latula was here.

He'd been right there, so how could Rose just guess he was keeping mum because he'd honestly forgotten and not because he's a stoic manly man of manliness who wanted to let bygones be bygones?

Sigh. "You flipped alignments, summoned some... Thing of Doom?"

"Void," she says, voice a bit weird. "Mage of Void."

Huh. Her perfect opposite. Awesome way to set the soul damage to 'permanent.'

"I walked in to get you out, something got fucked in a major way, I summoned blind and tadahh, Latula."

"... Something got fucked... in a major way..." Rose repeats, and groans and honest to god facepalms. "Yes, alright, I know what's missing now."

"Is it about how you almost inverted me too? No, wait, I can think about that no problem." He doesn't remember it, but there's no fog at all trying to think about it. Okay, so it's not about any soul damage Rose might have done Dave, or... Dave might have done Rose...? No, still no brain static.

"Stop digging before you hit Latula with your moron shovel," Karkat growls.

"Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I just want to make sure someone knows to keep an eye on that shit, is all." He stuffs his hands in his pockets, stares resolutely at the wall, and tries not to be sulkily jealous that Rose gets to know what's up with _his_ brain, and he doesn't. It's not her fault he forgot.

 _You ever do it to some other things? Like, unrelated to that?_ he asks Latula.

 _Nah._ She chuckles. _There's no need, bro, your worst trauma besides that is puppet-porn-related, and you're doing hella fine ignoring it on your own._

_... Thanks for the reminder. Wow yeah, it **has** been too long since I last contemplated the mystery of proboscis-fucking._

_Hehehe._

_Jerk._

A knock on the door makes Dave flinch. The door cracks open and Bro peers through. "You guys done out there? If not, put it on pause, it's showtime."

Sighing, Dave nods. "Yeah, I said everything I needed to, I think. You'll keep an eye out?" he asks Rose, who nods with more gravity than he knows how to deal with.

Karkat holds Kankri back by the wing, though. He looks up at Dave when Dave pauses, even as Kankri's spines bristle reflexively. "Get going, you'll be safe in there for a minute."

Dave shrugs, and follows Rose back in. As the door closes he hears Karkat hiss " _You_ ," and it echoes through his guts the way a Name does.

He's vaguely tempted to listen in, but he's also pretty sure Latula will white him out the second they say anything remotely interesting -- and then Rose and Bro turn to corral him against the door.

"Quick," she says. "We assumed you would, but do you want Karkat to be keyed into the wards? It can still be fixed if you don't."

Dave blinks; his brows furrow. "If I don't, am I gonna have to invite him every time he comes in?"

"Well, you could give him an open invitation," Bro replies, hands in pockets, but Dave is already...

"The only way he's gonna stop living with me is if he dies," he says. ... Wow, that was emo. "Or survives getting disincarnated, I guess," he adds. "Either way, him having access to my sweet bachelor pad on the mortal plane at that point is not really a concern."

"But you couldn't lock him out," Rose points out.

"... And?"

She sneaks a look at Bro and then starts chuckling. "Nothing. Very well."

"Dude, if we argue and I need a time out I'll take a walk," Dave says, grumpy, but Bro is already shoving him into place by the TV.

"Stand here, say nothing. Dirk! How's Meulin?"

"Purreally ready," Dirk replies, deadpan. "The purreadiest."

He starts to haze over with fur and mist.

Not everyone, strictly speaking, is necessary for the summoning -- Dave has heard Dirk say he could solo it, if he had, like, two more weeks.

There are demon-summoning circles on the floor amidst the wider sealing pattern -- small ones, one meter across tops, for consulting, not riding. Jane scatters flower petals into hers, Dirk deposits a cherry tomato plant in its pot in another circle, and Roxy opens up a -- _is that a hentai anthology_.

Wow. Dave thought he'd seen everything in matters of prices.

At least Roxy's new demon doesn't seem to be looking for arousal as a response, because Roxy is mostly laughing her tush off and showing Jane the funny parts -- which also seem to be the filthy parts if one can believe the faces Jane pulls.

Karkat and Kankri slip in with mere seconds to spare, and Kankri skitters around the circle to stand behind Rose, out of her pattern; Dave snaps his fingers to get Karkat's attention and points at the circle he's standing in.

He shuffles over as close to the edge of the main pattern as he can, and Karkat leaps across like a cat, wings wide open, lands perfectly grouped and doesn't jostle Dave even a little. How long has it been since he got this body?

Bro steps up. He's glitching like a badly compressed jpeg. "Top."

Dave and Karkat watch their friends step up, magic wreathing their shape.

Names buzz past, some Dave barely perceives, or doesn't perceive at all; Rose's twangs with fierce, excited thirst for knowledge (throwing pamphlets to the winds, here, have this, read that, spread it) and he knows he could summon it.

He waits as they braid things unseen together, as light and vibrations root themselves in the walls, travel invisible but ticklish in waves against his skin. The hair on his arms is standing up, half static, half goosebumps.

The pattern starts to... not really glow, it's more black light than real light, ultraviolet, maybe even fucking octarine for all Dave can tell, he's not really seeing it; he's seeing where it should be, maybe.

"Knife," Bro says laconically. Dave pulls out a little fold-out knife. It's kept razor-sharp just for times like this.

"Where from?"

"Stomach is good."

Sometimes it doesn't matter; he's glad he asked. He lifts up his shirt and runs the knife on his skin; for a second it just feels cold, and then it stings.

He goes down on one knee and Karkat is already sitting up on his heels to bare his belly, yeah, sure, go ahead, slice me up.

"Will blood _from_ a demon hurt the spell?" John asks Kankri under his breath.

From the corner of his eye, even as he leans in, Dave sees Kankri smirking thinly.

"Oh, no," he says, airy.

Dave is careful and wincing as he brushes the blade an inch past the edge of Karkat's rib armor -- he hates bleeding other people, he can never be sure he's judging the depth right (he hates hurting Karkat.)

He gathers Karkat's blood on the side of the blade, wipes some off his own stomach, waves the blade over the pattern.

A couple of mingled drops splatter on the floor.

Jade is the first to move, dashing across the floor to the nearest window. She leaps out and onto the fire escape with a loud clang; Bec whines, paws around, and teleports to parts unknown. John follows Jade out of the window; Jake is stuck in the corner by the bathroom door, and he sways on his feet, head turning to the window, to the door, as if not knowing where to run.

The Strilondes are fine, and so is Kankri. Rose jerks, eyes widening, and yells to Dave, " _Invite them in!_ "

"Everyone in the room, you're invited!" Dave says as fast as he can. Holy shit.

Jane lets out a shuddering breath from where she was still somehow holding her position in the pattern. "That was spectacularly unpleasant," she says, and then she firms her jaw and finishes up with another handful of petals.

She seals the spell and steps out of her part of the pattern and immediately lets herself fall on the couch, butt first. Jake joins her wobblingly.

"Huh," Karkat says. "Nice." Then he turns toward the window and goes, "John Egbert--" He pauses, frowns; "John Egbert, Heir of Breath, Jade Harley, Witch of Space, you can come in."

"Whoof," Jade says from her cautious perch on the windowsill. " _Zingy_." She lets herself slide back inside. John sits on the windowsill, eyebrows up, laughing incredulously.

"Did the demon blood do that?" Jane asks, shaking her hands like she has fire ant-levels of pins and needle.

Dave takes a cautious step out of his ward, and then looks down at Karkat and his sliced stomach. It's a shallow cut, but he still doesn't like seeing red beading on his dove-gray belly, it's disturbing.

"C'mon," he says quietly, and starts for the bathroom. "Gotta clean these up."

Karkat follows, looking interested, though he doesn't speak until they're slipping in the bathroom and Dave has closed the door most of the way behind them.

"Wonder if that means I also have root access to disinvite people?" he says, looking -- amused. But watching Dave real close for the answer, too.

Dave gets the first aid kit out and crouches on the tiles, opens it.

"Guess you do," he says in the end. "Only you're still not allowed to endanger people, so if it's life or death or injury you still gotta let them in." He picks up a cotton ball and pours rubbing alcohol on it. He doesn't look up. "I'd rather you were polite and didn't kick people out for no reason, or without warning."

"... But I _could_."

Dave shrugs, and pats the imbibed cotton ball lightly over Karkat's cut. "If that's what the spell says, then that's what it looks like to me."

"I could disinvite Egbert the Lesser."

"Mm."

"Right in the middle of a gaming marathon."

"... Mm."

"What the fuck is wrong with you," Karkat concludes, but he sounds more philosophical than like he's expecting a real answer. Which is good because Dave wouldn't give it.

"If you kick my guests out, I'd probably go out with them, fair warning. I don't mind spending time somewhere other than the apartment if you want some space, but I've still chosen to hang out with those people."

Karkat grimaces. "Urgh. So I can't. You know I have to babysit your ass."

Dave throws the cotton away, sticks on a bandage, careful to smooth the folds out.

"We could stay in the stairwell." A shrug. "Most of the people I hang out with are pretty badass. You could trust them with me for five minutes -- no, I agree, not _now_ , but after the Felt are dealt with. We're gonna want to see less of each other at some point, and short of installing new walls and a second bathroom and fridge it's gonna be difficult to do that in here."

He expects lip about how it's impossible for Karkat to want to see Dave less than he already does, or about not trusting any of his friends to protect their own asses from amorous dogs, never mind from criminals. Karkat says nothing. He's watching him, inscrutable, eyes glowing faintly.

Dave gets up, props the first aid kit on the sink, prepares a second piece of cotton for himself. He lifts the bottom of his shirt -- there's a stain now, whoops -- and Karkat's hand closes on his wrist.

"... Let me drink first."

He's going to get hardly anything from there, it's already done bleeding, but there's something intense in the way he asks that makes Dave stare dumbly at him.

It's been a little while since he had Dave's blood, Dave supposes? They've been doing it mostly with sex for a while now. Apart from in the middle of that rooftop clusterfuck last week. Hard to appreciate the bouquet, maybe?

"Yeah, sure."

He holds his shirt up against his ribs and ends up leaning against the sink; Karkat's gauntleted hand closes on his hip for balance and he leans in, raises up.

"Do you, uh, want me to cut again? It's not gonna be much, I--"

Wet, hot mouth on his stomach; he barely feels the sting. "Shut up," Karkat growls against his skin, and starts lapping.

He worries at the edges of the wound with his teeth, careful not to bite through Dave's skin, and Dave feels a burst of warmth between his hips, lower than that.

It lasts barely three seconds before Karkat is leaning back, letting go.

"Got enough?"

"Wasn't for food," Karkat replies, already turning away.

"--So why?"

A shrug, a narrow-eyed look. "Because reasons. Are you going to push?"

Dave blinked, nonplussed. "... I guess not." A short sigh. "I'm just gonna assume it's about the Latula stuff and butt out."

"It's got nothing to do with that," Karkat retorts, and when he looks up at Dave he looks frustrated, frowning, jaw tight. Not angry, though, not that. "Something's weird. I have nothing but weird impressions to share, though, I can't even put them in words right so it's useless to talk about them."

"Weird bad?"

Karkat sighs through his nose. "Just -- weird."

"You could ask Kankri?" Dave suggests, and Karkat bristles.

"He'd fucking love that, wouldn't he? I bet it's all he's waiting for. No."

Someone knocks at the door, and Karkat is tearing the door open and stomping out past a startled Jake before Dave can say anything else. Dave shrugs at Jake, and applies the cotton ball.

"Toilet break? Sorry, I'll be done in a minute."

"Oh, no. I was just going to ask what you wanted on your pizza?"

... Heh. "I'm up for whatever, bro."

He finishes cleaning up and puts the first aid kit away. Jake waits for him to be done.

"Looks like this is turning into a right old party in here, hope you don't mind!"

"It's cool." They did bust their asses to make him safe, and no one even bitched him out much for wanting to stay here. Jade grumped, and Rose gave him pointed looks, and John sighed extra-loudly, but then they canned it, and haven't brought it back up.

He'd love to climb into his bed and burrow under his blankets while listening to his music, but he can wait. He doubts everyone will want to stay until three AM.

He finishes cleaning up his cut, and leaves the bathroom. Bro elbows him aside the second he steps out.

"Jesus H Christ, you take even longer to take dumps now."

"I was reading Cosmo, Bro, damn it."

"Oh well then, in that case."

Bro glances down at his stomach. The shirt he's wearing is dark enough that the spot of blood doesn't show through, there's nothing to see. He pushes Dave with his shoulder one more time for the road and disappears inside the bathroom.

Dave mingles. Hey there, how's work going, you watching that new series, no spoilers John I will cut you, do I really have to look at pictures of the new cat, Auntie, okay I guess she's pretty as fur bags go...

The pizza guy comes and he races Jade to the door, but she sics Bec on him; the dog teleports him right back to the stairs that go up to the mezzanine.

Karkat is perched there, sitting sideways on the fourth step with his arm wound under the sixth so he can be at face height -- and while Jake blinks at Dave as he appears right between them, Karkat glares.

"Do not open the door when you don't know who the fuck it is, for fuck's sake, you have the survival skills of a depressed lemming."

He reaches out and grabs Dave by the elbow and tugs him until Dave is leaning on the step. Dave decides that he doesn't need to mention the pizza guy isn't even in the building yet, it was just the intercom.

"Yeah, yeah." He shifts, sits straighter. (Karkat's knee is touching his thigh.) At the door Jade looks back at him and grins, triumphant; Dave makes a show of turning back to Jake and Karkat, like he totally meant to get that punked. "So what were we talking about in this delightful corner of gentlemanly pursuits?"

Karkat rolls his eyes, but Jake lights up. "Oh, yes! As I was just telling Karkat -- Erisol has been visiting!"

"You mean he ghosts around the edges of your circles and doesn't ever really step in," Karkat corrects, but he sounds fond; there's a little smile floating at the corner of his mouth.

"I _mean_ , my dear doubter, that the other day he _rode_."

Karkat puts on a deadpan face. "What, _no_ way."

"Most certainly way!" Jake rocks on the balls of his feet. "Granted, we didn't sign any contract, and that's a dang-darned shame, but he was more than willing to share my senses as I ate honey, and boy did I stuff myself with it! I still felt a tad sick the morning after. I figure it's perfectly alright to spend time on establishing trust--"

"On establishing that you're the chumpiest sucker worldwide, you mean," Karkat retorts, smiling a bit wider. "I guess that's good if you want him to come back and abuse you grossly. He's still level three, though, he's not gonna be anywhere close to how badass he was at the bank if he comes back as a rider."

Jake purses his lips in disapproval, shrugs elaborately. "Who cares! He might well grow up into a fine Class Four during my lifetime."

"And then you'll have a leg up on the competition?"

"Yes," Jake affirms with the air of the guy who only just figured that out, and then amends with a little chagrined smile, "but mostly I just wanted to make it up some to the poor tyke, he had such a bad time of it when he was in our care..."

"You weren't even his original summoner!" Karkat protests, and throws a hand in the air.

"Yes, but _urgh_ , I'm more than man enough to admit that that disincarnating spell gave me nightmares." Jake turns to Dave. "Well, Strider, what say you?"

Dave was content watching them interact. He shrugs. "Yeah, it was gross." Thinking about Karkat going through that is bad enough without knowing that there's a non-negligible chance he wouldn't live. Erisol is Doom, they can take a lot of punishment and somehow keep going. Blood? No idea.

There'd be more of them out there if they could take the kind of beatings Doom or Rage do.

Jade comes back with the pizzas in a stack and starts touring the room. People munch. Karkat and Jake keep talking about Erisol through their the Works slices, Karkat with the proprietary interest of a dude who found a starving kitten on the street grilling the person trying to adopt it.

Dave drifts off. Piles three slices on a torn-off corner of the box, and climbs out through his window and onto the fire escape, where it's dark and the evening air is cool, fresher than inside even with all the windows open. He sees Karkat twitching, but he's still in sight, it'll have to be good enough.

He goes to lean his back against the railing, and holds the cardboard plate out for Dirk to pick up a slice.

Dirk's been watching Jake for the last half-hour.

Nothing too obvious, but.

"Dude," Dave says, quiet under the sound of laughter and muffled conversations coming from his apartment. "It's been six years."

Dirk stares down at his pizza like he's contemplating dropping it to its death over the railing. Then he takes a quick, stubborn bite and probably tastes none of it. "... Yeah, so."

"You dicked that other guy for like a year and a half." What was his name again? Alex. Drew. Something.

Dirk stares grimly down the darkened backstreet, the pizza forgotten in his hand. "Yeah, why do you think we broke up."

Oh, Jesus. Dave knew his brother still had a weak spot for Jake. That he'd be game if Jake went back to him and was like, _hey, you know, I think I was wrong when I decided I was straight after all_.

"You guys were _shit_ together," Dave says, quieter still. Jake pushed Dirk to be the worst he could be -- manipulative and paranoid and so desperate to hold on, he scared him right off. Jake's aversion to conflict, too -- Dirk doesn't like being handled with kid gloves, or any gloves at all. Just make the punch stark if you can't make it funny and he'll analyze its merits even as it shatters his jaw.

Jake's too _nice_ for Dirk.

"I _know_." Dirk's teeth are clenched together. He's still refusing to look at Dave.

"... He thinks it's awesome that you're friends."

"Feel free to stop throwing obvious feces from Captain Obvious' own ass any time," Dirk grits out. "You think I haven't known that from the start?" He turns to Dave. "You think that changes anything? This is the same basic shit I told myself six years back, but Guru No Duh lays it out and I'm suddenly going to stop _pining_ like someone finally took a good whack at my malfunctioning brain? Yeah, it was just a loose gear, happens all the time with this model."

Dave bows his head. "...Yeah, sorry."

Dirk resettles against the railing, and almost crosses his arms with pizza included. He glowers at it for a second before he rolls it up and bites it in two. A moment later he mutters, "Must run in the family."

...Yeah, Dave deserved that one.

The thing is...

The thing is.

Dirk is a stupid fucking dumbass.

Dave is orders of magnitude worse.

"If you're insisting on being outside the brand-new super useful wards, could you two suicidal dumbasses even attempt to _not_ turn your backs to the same end of the street?" Karkat comments, crouching on the windowsill like a little gargoyle.

Dave looks at his expressive, pointy face, the heavy-lidded 'I don't even know why I'm bothering to mention the dumb at this point' look, the way his black lips purse ever so slightly in disapproval.

"We're planning out a zip-line," he lies. "Steel cables, a pulley, and suddenly you've got a secret escape. It's not as much of a classic as a tunnel behind the CD shelves, but probably more fun."

"Huh." Dave is pretty sure Karkat knows he's bullshitting him, but his eyes flick across the street to the other building, measuring angles and distances. "I get to go first. Slightly better chance that I'll bounce. Also lower chance that your gross sweaty mitts will send you to your death."

He looks entertained, though. Interested, a bit. At the very least the suggestion amuses him.

"Pff. Safety concerns, my left butt cheek. You just want to feel the wind in your hair."

Instead of denying, Karkat lifts his chin, stares straight back. "And?"

"...So long as you don't hog it," Dave says, and makes a note to call around to see if a forest adventure park out there with the rope bridges between trees and everything will be okay with Karkat dropping by. Probably the closest thing he'll ever get to flying under his own power.

Then again, putting a harness on him might prove pretty complicated. Might need to research that shit...

When Dave glances to the side, Dirk is staring at him, and he says nothing, but he says it very pointedly.

\--

It's been a week since the investigation into his discharge of demon was concluded and Dave got to go back to work, and he was sure he'd somehow miraculously escaped retribution, but the next Monday when he and Karkat walk into their cubicle there's a dildo suction-cupped to his desk, saluting the acoustic tiles.

The cubicles surrounding his bloom with grinning human heads. The whole bullpen explodes into laughter.

It's peach-fleshy-colored and has slightly too realistic veins, and is approximately a size XXX. Dave's wrist is getting thickness envy. _Jake's_ wrist would get thickness envy.

Dave is blushing so badly even his throat feels hot. "Haha. Yeah. Thanks guys. I can't imagine all the use I'm gonna get out of this. Wow."

The really cool thing to do would be to leave it there all day long and act just like it's not, wow, a _dildo_ , le gasp! you guys act like teenagers, haha, cute. The really cool thing would have him mortified all day.

"You gonna take it out for dinner first or what?" John calls out, laughing. The bunch of assholes around him are not going to budge until he actually touches the thing to put it away. Dave steels himself and takes a step forward.

Karkat beats him there, yanking the dildo free with a loud plop, and turns it over to look at the bottom with one eyebrow up.

Then he looks up to scan the crowd, and asks the lot of them, "Does it vibrate?"

A brief moment of startled silence.

"Um. No?" eventually replies the person who probably bought it, blushing in turn.

"Well what kind of good is it, then?" Karkat returns, and chucks it negligently into the trash bin.

Dave lets himself laugh, laughs so hard his cheeks hurt from trying to restrain it.

After everyone is done jeering and laughing and has returned to their seats, Karkat looks up at him, throws the dildo a dubious look (it's hanging on the edge of the bin by the balls) and asks, "Did you want to keep it?"

Dave is very, very glad to assure him that he in fact does not.

\--

"... don't get why you don't bring Bec along. Talk about a fucking waste of resources."

Dave is trudging after Jade and Karkat, and before the two Class Three summoner-officers he's been assigned for protection detail, neatly sandwiched. They're not expecting any trouble, but hey, these are the borderlands, it's not a bad plan to have backup just in case.

"He's not certified as a police dog," Jade replies philosophically. "Probably just as well, I mean, how do you want me to arrest any criminals if every time I'm threatened Bec deals with it by making the threat, um, _go away_ , to somewhere I have never managed to locate?"

She's not especially trying to talk quietly to keep the officers from overhearing, so Dave figures it never happened with human beings.

"I guess it would look pretty bad if all your enemies conveniently disappeared, never to be seen again," Karkat says, but he doesn't seem convinced. He goes on muttering something about _boy_ , how he would be _disappointed_ if the Felt dickheads after their asses suddenly went tragically missing.

Dave ambles after them, fingertips tucked into his pockets, brand new, smart as fuck jacket unbuttoned with suave carelessness so he can get at his armpit holster. It's maybe a bit overdressed for the wastelands...

Eh, who cares. He's been ruining a lot of clothes since he got Karkat, he deserved to treat himself a bit. Who's the classiest motherfucker this side of the hell gate? That's right, it's him.

He did put on sensible, broken-in shoes, because he does have to walk across all that broken pavement and rubble, but the only reason he's not wearing a waistcoat is that the one that matches the rest of his outfit snags on the gun.

Okay, the real reason is he's wearing Kevlar. But if he didn't he still couldn't wear his waistcoat. Boo.

Jade is in combat boots and solid jeans, though there's a heart done in pink thread on her back pocket. Karkat has on a bright green fanny pack for his phone. It rests in a precarious balance over one of his hips, the strap protected from his spine blade by a layer of hard plastic, and he nudges it back around every fifteen minutes when the pocket slides down to his belly and interferes with his hip joints. Experiment to repeat with a better conceived strap, but they had this one at hand and it had to be tested someday, so hey, why not now.

They are motherfucking fashion plates. So far two incarnate Class Ones have beheld them and perished.

The way the fanny pack swings over the small of Karkat's back with each step reminds Dave a bit too much of the existence of his ass. He was right, all that time ago with John; naked demon looks normal after a while, but put a single piece of clothing on them and suddenly it looks downright fetishistic.

Jade's phone vibrates. She pulls it out, lifts it to her ear.

"Copy," she says after a few seconds have gone by, and Dave knows it's Dispatch.

The uniforms behind them are perking up too, moving closer. Jade turns to grin at the lot of them.

Not the Felt then. No need to evacuate.

"Corporeal demon sighting at the edge of the no man's land! Someone just called it in, said it's been hanging out around the place for the last two days." Even as she starts jogging in the appropriate direction, she shrugs, frowns a little. Dave falls into step with her. "No idea why they didn't call it in sooner. Even the Class Ones are dangerous if you have no weapon..."

"Would someone living in this kind of place not have a weapon, though," Karkat inquires, and gives their surroundings a pointed look. They're in an area that's pretty much officially abandoned, but it's far enough from the hell gate that Dave knows half of the good apartments still left will be squats. Some of these places even still get water, though power's been cut to whole blocks and would have to be drawn from the closest still-livable buildings; you could live okay around the place, if you had nowhere else to go. Better than sleeping on a subway grate, and homeless shelters are for emergency purposes, they don't feel much like homes.

It's lousy with low-class demons and crooks, though.

"... Yeah, alright," Jade says, "point."

They're not going very far. "Description?" Dave asks, like they won't be putting down every single corporeal demon they see without a handler and permit -- so, effectually, every demon they see.

"Snakelike?" Jade replies, unsure. "Dispatch said description was unclear. Pretty big, but what that means -- I dunno."

Karkat crackles red and bounds beside Dave, spine blades bristle with dangerous interest. He's not worried; he might be a little eager. He hasn't been using his red attack today, just in case he needed to hit something bigger than the unidentifiable ooze Jade slammed with Damara and the ball of spider legs one of the officers shot through.

"You still want Damara?" Dave asks. Jade grimaces.

"You can have her this time -- swear if she wasn't so good at breaking things..."

Hahaaaa, yeah, does he get that.

He fishes an old watch out of his pocket, swings it, teasing. Damara comes to his call resentful, but hungry.

_We break a thing today? Give me break a thing._

_You just ate, you'll live another minute. No hard feelings from last time?_ he can't help but check. (He's probably the one who should have hard feelings.)

_You throw red bitch at me. I have hard feeling all the time. Her, you. Big long throbbing feeling. I fuck your skull with my hard feeling thing, good, yes._

He almost stops her right there and stops listening. The usual gross, aimless garbage.

She goes purry, enticing. _One day I kill red bitch with my cunt teeth, or she kill me. I have more use for you. Stronger. You want to feed me your long hard dick, come down my throat like a fire hose, splatter me with thick man essence of power. **I am better than her, give it to me**._

Whoa um. That was unexpected. He wonders what Aradia would say. Probably she'd laugh... _Yeah, sorry, not taking a side here._

Damara sighs. _Fair. You suck goat piss in rest stop of satan truckers. Give me the sex of you and the blood one one time, I show you good spells, good time, you will like it._

Dave glances down at Karkat. His nostrils are flaring, his chin is up. He's so eager for a real fight... _Yeah, I think you'll manage to pry his food from his clawed little fingers once his soul and body are both dead, and even then you'll probably have to wait until rot sets in._

Damara sighs into his mind, and settles in. it's strange to have her so close; she rarely stays, hops on and off his mind-ride in a flash...

_You're cuddly today, wow, it's almost like you like me._

_I like you._

Dave braces for grossness.

_I like the scream of your death in my teeth that will be. Virile essence good and thick. Clockfucker. Put your dick on a clock and destroy it that way. Beat your dick, it good hurt. Gear bruises on your balls. Jizz in tooth wheels, gunks up the--_

_Whoa, look at that, now that's a novel experience! I think you've officially managed to hit 'too kinky for me.'_

She laughs all rusty and saw-toothed; it sounds almost indulgent. Dave knows exactly how fast she will turn on him the second she can.

_Give me a death._

_We'll see._ Dave doesn't promise. He won't kill people or random animals. Might give her the stray demon's death, if he can. If one of the others doesn't get it first.

 _Guess you'll just have to be fast on the draw_ , he adds, laconic. Damara burrows closer and lets him feel all her rust and decay. She is ready. She is _so_ ready. Just let the Space bitch or the Blood one try to get the drop on her.

Music up ahead, someone scratching on a guitar, a human voice, quiet conversation, and the lot of them slow down, check the area. Ambush? No visible ambush. Proceed.

They turn the corner. Karkat first, then Jade, then Dave, and the uniforms...

... Dave isn't sure what the uniforms do.

Two buildings down, Kurloz is sitting on the curb with a hobo, in all his bruise-purple, dolphin-fluked glory.

He looks up at them -- long elegant gold-and-ochre horns, face eerie in a way Dave can't define, propped up on his murderhook-nailed hands and his mane snaking and poofing all over the place. Dave and the others stare back, stunned stupid.

He's sitting maybe two feet away from the hobo and his guitar and it's the old man who moves first.

" _No, don't, he's wit' me!_ "

 _What the **fuck**_ , Dave thinks and in his head Damara falters, loosens, and then surges back so tight against him he can tell exactly how everything in a six meter radius would crumble -- how long Jade's hair would take to blow off her skull, how long Karkat's meat would take to rot and his empty shell desiccate. (The shell would last centuries.)

He chokes, holds her back, hand clenched so hard on the clock he's afraid he'll break it without meaning to. _I thought you liked him!_ She'd been such a bitch about aiming at him before--

"What the hell--" Jade starts, and she has her gun up, the officers have their guns up, only Dave hasn't drawn yet. She cuts him a glance and Dave knows she's thinking of grabbing his wrist and teleporting him to safety.

"He's cool, we're cool," the hobo is babbling, hands held wide, looking absolutely nothing like a Felt agent, and one of the officers goes "Ma'am?" all quiet and tight with her gun up and crystals growing ghostlike on her skin.

The demon is still sitting dumbly on his ass and staring at them and for a very short second he reminds Dave of college students found smoking marijuana, how long it took them to realize they'd been caught.

Then Karkat stalks forward two feet and crackles menacingly. "Okay! Face down on the ground, hands behind your head!"

The hobo complies like he's so used to the routine he didn't even register who it came from. Kurloz...

... The other demon looks at the hobo with baffled incomprehension, then at Karkat -- head tilted, goring horns so deadly-sharp (weren't they longer?) -- Kurloz is a baby right now -- at Karkat with a look like surprise, like _interest_...

Then he looks up past Karkat, up at the group of them with Jade's moonlit glow and Dave's cracked gears, and he flips over like a beached fish and streaks straight for the closest backstreet.

"Hey!" Karkat shouts, and takes off running. "No resisting arrest! Come back right now!"

He comes to a stop before the mouth of the alley and Dave moves to cover him -- shit, shit, ambush -- but Karkat turns to him with a disgusted sniff.

"Well, he's gone." A sharp, grumpy look at the hobo, who the officers are pinning down right now (no terror, no hate. Isn't this Kurloz? Isn't this --) "Who the fuck are you and who is his master?"

A pause.

"Also, do you have his Name?"


	26. Chapter 26

"You know, you guys _could_ have been ordered off the field entirely!"

Dave dislikes Roxy _immensely_ right now.

There she is, sitting on the low windowsill of what used to be a hairdresser's shop window, wearing that stupid Venice mask with the feather and swinging her legs. The thing is violently pink and sequined, catches every ray of light that manages to pierce the grime. Dave keeps losing track of her every time she stops talking.

Dave makes sure his tush is extra-cocooned in this here creaky old chair, and tries not to think about the old crusted-dry gunk marking the edges of the hair-washing basin he's propping his head against.

"We _could_ have been ordered to be goddamn useful, too," Karkat replies before Dave can. "Not that I mind being hidden away and doled out penny by penny like the peerless treasure I fucking am, but if we're that precious, the fuck kind of sense does it make only having the two of you as guards?"

"All the sense in the world!" Roxy replies -- huh, she's still in the same spot. The feather wobbles with her nodding, the tip almost two feet over her actual head. "I got Horuss to make sure no one finds y'all..."

"And I've got my good old buddy Eridan to shoot anyone who finds you anyway full of holes!" Jake continues for her. They both turn from the window to grin.

"And if they're not dead when Jakey and Eri are done with them, I've also got Equius to beat them into the ground. Tadah."

Karkat stares at them, and then turns to stare across the dusty floor at Dave to share his total absence of admiration.

"And the brass don't have more people to spare for us," Dave finishes cynically. "Since everyone they could spare is already on that demon's ass--"

Roxy's phone beeps, once; Dave loses her, and then finds her again without her saying a word -- her spell is down. A second later a crackling cage of red materializes around him.

The air tears green inside the room, and then Jade pops through, holding an officer in an elbow lock. The second she's landed on the wooden floor she kicks the struggling man in the back of the leg, pushing him down on both knees.

Dave sighs, doesn't even bother to extract his head from the basin's neck-holder thingamajig, and waves at Karkat to do his job. Karkat bounces forward, tail shaking happily, and bites the struggling man in the meat of the shoulder, right past the kevlar jacket.

 _Done and extra-done,_ Latula says, trying for chipper. _Scope out that tight shield-weave, hellz yes._

The man blinks, shudders. Jade peers over his shoulder. "You okay now, Biggins?"

"Um. Yeah. Sure." Still on his knees, the officer blinks dazedly at the rows of hairdresser's chairs, the cracked mirrors. "What the hell happened? Where--"

Jade waves at Dave, who is still surrounded by Karkat's creepy blood vines, and winks them right off. Roxy waits a beat, and goes Waldo again.

Bleuuurgh. Worst. Fucking. Day.

_C'mon, flameo, could be worse._

_Oh yeah. I could stand around with **both** thumbs up my ass while other people work._

Latula sighs and subsides, uncomfortable. Damara is still sulking in the back of Dave's brain, radiating insulted vibes and ignoring Latula so loudly he'd almost prefer she try to take a bite out of her. Dave has no idea why his favorite Timefucker hasn't fucked off yet.

 _You're a liar,_ Damara pipes up, right on time.

 _How am I a liar now, I promised you jack shit with a side of nothing_.

_You tell me get ready fast on the draw, but then you get not a chance to draw. Unfair._

Dave isn't really concerned with going out of his way to be fair to Damara. Especially when moving closer to the action will get Captain Egbert and Captain Vaughn from Major Crimes to land on his back like a ton of bricks, if Jade doesn't get him first.

The new demon is not Kurloz -- Karkat is so sure of that that when they asked him to confirm he stared for a whole fifteen seconds and then asked them if they'd managed to fling dog shit into their eyes or what. It's got the same body type and the same shape of horns and the same skin color and the same everything but it's _completely different_ from Kurloz!

It's still a corporeal Class Fucking Four of Rage.

An unbound one, if they believe Hobo Dean.

The homeless people around the area were terrified of him when he started to drop by to listen to their impromptu street concerts, but he never devoured any of them. Dave is pretty sure the awkward evasions were implying that Hobo Dean believes that he did eat other people, but they were either from an enemy hobo gang or from some mafia trying to shake money out of them, so good old Dean wasn't planning to bring it up.

"How do you think he feeds himself?" he asks the room at large. "I mean, if no one feeds him."

Jake looks up from the gun he's polishing -- this is not even a metaphor, the guy is a bit obsessed. "Do you figure he could receive his Price even without a bond to channel it through?"

"There doesn't need to be a master-slave contract," Karkat replies, mouth pursed in thought. "Does need to be at least a temporary contract set up first, or the spillover would be so bad as to render it useless, depending on how fiddly his specific Price is. I don't see how flesh would make _that_ moot."

"Or he could get his needs met in, idek, dead pigeons? Rats?" Roxy says -- huh, she's moved to the other side of the window. "Lost cats, purse dogs--"

Karkat snorts. "Yeah, no. Class Four. You'd need a cartload a day to make a dent. Now, you see a drop in the local zoo's gorilla or porpoise numbers and we'll talk."

Okay, Dave muses, if animal sacrifices aren't it, what could...

"... And now I'm thinking of a hobo harem relay-race and since I love you all, here I am sharing it. Enjoy."

"Augh! _Strider!_ You fiend!"

Dave waves his fingers gently at Jake, who splutters.

"Could work," Karkat muses. Dave and Jake both wince. "They'd all have to pitch in though. The spillover rate is hard to figure out but I'd be surprised if--"

" _Karkat, oh my god, no_."

The smirk Karkat flashes him has Dave's eyes widen; his guts tighten just a smidgen.

"You jerk, you _knew_ what--"

 _Oooh, don't **even**_ , snarls Latula without warning. _\--Dang it!_

Space tears again but with no heads-up phone call first in the street, a few houses down, and Karkat leaps across the dusty planks. Dave extracts himself from his chair in an awkward hurry, rapping the base of his skull against the headrest on the way out. Ow.

_Latula, what's --_

She's barely listening, all coiled watchful and bristly, like a cat at a mousehole. _Ooh, the nerve. He wants to throw down, fine! I'mma make him eat it!_

Out there in the street a woman screams, half-pain, half-rage, and it's Jade.

Someone's hand closes on his arm -- Roxy, can't see -- he yanks.

"Harley!" Karkat yells through the closed door, his hand on the handle, but he slinks Dave a glance and, no, can't go, Dave comes first --

"Go!" Dave snaps, and pulls his gun out of its holster.

Jake and Roxy are telling him to stop but that's his partner out there with a great ugly bruise-skinned dolphin-assed demon coiled around her and he can feel the way madness scratches against Latula's scales in the back of his head, the scales he and Latula and Karkat lent Jade.

He is going to spring this fucking trap with both feet, is what he's gonna do.

Damara surges through him with barely a thought -- he can feel her draping herself over him like a fur coat made of fire and decay. He wraps her closer.

Karkat gallops ahead like a small tank. Jade stumbles, bats at the demon's coils -- and the demon blinks down at Karkat and his bristling, and tumble-flops right off her. He rolls on the pavement. (Dave thinks, irrationally, of a play-doh tube.)

Karkat swerves around Jade, wobbling on her feet, her brown skin gone ashen, and hisses at the other demon with all his spines out, wings flared.

Dave has a sudden image of a possessed Jade grabbing for them and breaking them again. "Karkat!" He points at Jade. "Gotta--"

 _No, wait, I still got her!_ Latula cries out, triumphant. _Score!_

Dave smoothly points at Dolphin Glutes instead.

He pauses briefly by Jade -- doesn't touch her, what if it's a trap, he trusts Latula but -- and Jake catches up, catches his cousin by both elbows before she can topple to the ground.

_Yeah, yeah, it ain't cracked, I've got her, gogogo!_

Dave starts after his demon again.

Karkat and the other demon are doing a snake and mongoose thing -- Rage-chan swaying on his tail, not floating, Dave isn't sure why, as Karkat circles back and forth with aggressive almost-pounces. Dave goes around a bit so he can cover Karkat, and feels Roxy's hand on his shoulder.

"Jake's got Jade," she says, "I got backup coming, now you _stay with me_."

"Yeah, sure," he says. He doesn't mind being invisible in the process of kicking ass, he guesses.

"You really ought to surrender," Karkat is saying, which might be a straight-up lie as demon patrol out here is pretty much demon extermination and nobody ever bats an eye, not even the animal protection leagues.

Granted, rogue corporeals are usually Levels One or Two and thus as sentient as potentially-rabid stray cats at the very most.

"I don't see as to how I should do that, brother," the other demon tells him -- with his voice -- and sure, it echoes weird in Dave's skull but it doesn't _burrow_ like Kurloz' mind-voice did. "Those brothers with them bullet things up and got hella salty on me."

(... Most annoying speech pattern ever award goes to...! Sorry Damz, sorry Meulin.)

Feels like it could get through his shields, with a little more push, but Dave is suddenly not sure that this demon has quite as much push to dish out. Smaller body, smaller horns, shorter hair -- reminds him of the differences between Karkat and Kankri.

It's hard to judge power levels between an active and passive class, but Kankri feels older, as demons count these things, the way Kurloz looked subtly older and bigger than this one; does it affect anything but the body shape? Level Four covers a lot of ground... _Latula? Damara? Whatcha think?_

_Either way he's still hella dangerous! I don't like what he did to J-dog much, he almost broke through, and he did manage to get her to bring him right to you--_

_Who cares! Prove stronger. Prove you a man._ _**Devour him** _ _. You have allies. Gangbang him_ _until_ _death._

"They're twitchy 'cause an asshole whose flesh costume looks a lot like yours laid the beatdown on their asses some time ago. You wouldn't happen to know a Kurloz, would you?"

"Um, not as suchlike," the other demon lies, eyes squinching and zipping off to the side in the most blatant tell since Tavros-in-John.

"Uh _huh_. Anyway he fucked them up, now they want to fuck back, it's an orgy in these streets and you have been cordially invited." Karkat smiles, or bares his teeth maybe. "I, personally, have no stakes in this mess, save that my idiot summoner is of course standing right in the middle of this shit pile dancing a lively polka. Who's your summoner?"

Awkward silence.

"Um. I ain't sure I can up and tell."

"You're not _sure_? How vague is your contract?"

From here Dave is fairly sure he could... okay, move a few meters forward, and then boom headshot.

Actually Roxy would be an even better bet, though she doesn't have a rifle on her. Girl's aim is unreal.

He's not sure why she doesn't take the shot.

He knows why he han't. This dude is only different from Karkat because of chance and circumstances. He doesn't want to kill him on Karkat's lap unless he has to. There have been a couple of bad injuries so far, but no deaths. Jade is alive, he doesn't know how injured.

(The Felt man dying on top of him as Aradia fed--)

"Was a group summoning thing?" the other demon says, hesitant, and they're staring at each other and not even swaying-posturing much anymore, just... Just talking. Tense, but -- talking. There's pale gray spread roughly on his face like chalk or ashes, no skull hat like Kurloz, but underneath it's just a raw-boned, utterly human face. Maybe something _other_ in the flattish nose... "Only I got me this asshole to call mine, but the loop was all, I dunno. Dunno who held it, dunno how much is left, but I can feel 'em tugging their dirty _leash_ at my neck all trying to call me to _heel_ like I can be _motherfucking tamed_ \--"

Oh Jesus. Dave takes aim.

"Hey, hey, calm your tits," Karkat says -- he sounds oddly at ease, oddly patient. "None of them are here and it's obvious it's not working anyway, why do you care if they want to waste their strength trying?"

"But it's all up and harshing my mellow, man," the other demon _whines_. "All with the tug tug _motherfucking_ tug, skittering in my nug like those itsy bitty eight-legged sisters. I whacked all down at one of 'em calling infidels already but fuck if that helped much. Can't barely be listening to what sounds that my street brothers make for me all pretty."

"Guess that would suck," Karkat says very reasonably, and something twangs in Dave's chest about the total lack of hostility or matter of fact wariness in his tone. He doesn't even _know_ the guy. "Wait -- is that your price? Street music?"

The Rage demon shrugs. "I guess."

"Does it sustain you, meatstick?!" Karkat tugs on a fistful of his own hair in brief irritation. "Urgh, never mind, either it's that or something else. You kill any humans for food?"

"Uhm."

... It's a bad time for laughing but the 'welp' face Karkat pulls is hilarious.

"They was bringing the hurt to my street bros first, though, disturbing my music, can't all up and let at those motherfuckers--"

"Okay. Okay." Karkat sighs, sits right there on the ground, rakes a hand through his hair. "That's fair."

"E-T-A two minutes thirty," Roxy breathes in Dave's ear. Fuck, that's long...

Karkat frowns to himself, and then gives a decisive nod. "If you swear on your Name to only feed from your Price -- and like, blood and sex I guess -- I think I can talk the police into not shooting you dead--"

What.

"Karkat, what the shit!" Roxy protests. The other demon glances their way, visibly startled.

Karkat ignores her completely. "-- _If you answer me this_ ," he growls suddenly, and briefly crackles red, and grabs everyone's attention right back. "Was it the Felt that summoned you?"

"... Yeah," the other demon says, staring helpless and fascinated.

... Oh. Hey. Extracting information. They'll make a real cop outta him some day soon.

Though really he should know better than to make promises none of Dave's colleagues will want to agree to. Yeah, there's that.

"Only then they was like, hey, Rage lives through some hella stuff what hurts a fuckload," the Rage demon continues cautiously, "and then I bailed."

Karkat makes an encouraging noise, head tilted. One minute, fifty seconds left.

"Kurloz was all for it and I was like why fucking not, right, sounded interesting, but I don't rightly know how they meant me to stand there and not break anyone's fucking head when they were putting that hurt on me, opposibro, you get me?" A helpless shrug.

Karkat snorts in honest amusement. "You're Rage and you can't take some pain?"

Dave is fine letting Karkat stall for time, but the more they chat and the less he knows if Karkat knows they're just stalling. It's... Fuck.

There's no way he doesn't mean to intercede on this guy's behalf, and Dave's colleagues, his bosses...

Egbert would be fine, his usual peep squad would be fine, but...

Captain Vaughn is going to be a pain already; Dave doesn't even want to think of the Chief of Police or anyone else.

"Aw, c'mon, brother, ain't fair, I was all fresh up meat-wrapped, hardly knew my tail from my horn-tips yet."

Karkat's wings and all their blades and claw-tips slowly come down; his face does something complicated and then goes _soft_. "You panicked, didn't you."

"Um, yeah." He coils himself small against the ground. "Could take it now, I think, but like, I don't even got any want to do it for any of them now. It's _nice_ here. I got my bros to watch out for who watch out for me," he says, kind of shy, kind of earnest behind the wavery-drunk vagueness, and then three cars burst past the corner, motors entirely silent.

Dave isn't sure what alerts the demon of what's coming up behind him -- sixth sense, Karkat flinching, the sound-killing demon's aura, the heated rubber smell -- but he flips.

The street empties of air; Dave's knees wobble. He needs to run away, he needs to run but he _can't move_ \--

Latula doesn't even speak, just snaps her fangs, and he can breathe again. "Karkat, _dodge!_ " he yells, as some fucking asshole on loan from Traffic or who-knows-where pops out of his window, gun already out.

Roxy drags him back to the sidewalk; Dave lets her, watching as the Rage demon rushes to the other side of the street -- window, metal shutter, what does he -- oh _fuck_.

The window-length clay planter full of weeds and dandelions goes flying like it weighs nothing at all, lands on the car's hood and not through its front window; the driver braked just in time. The second car glances off the first car's side, brakes as well, and then the Rage demon is flowing up alongside the wall like he's swimming in a waterfall in reverse.

Three stories. Plenty of time to aim.

Damara surges, and Dave crumbles the brick over his head, showering him in brick and dust.

 _No! His back was to us! Aim me right!_ Damara howls as the demon falls, like whatever was dragging him upwards has been suddenly cut. He catches himself one story up from the ground -- gunfire, then. Blood splashes the wall -- glancing hits, the angle is bad.

Dave advances in the street, yelling at the officers to keep their fucking guns down, Karkat's in the middle of this, who are these fucking clowns -- oh fuck, it's the goddamn cowboys borrowed from Major Crimes.

"Net!" Jade yells, and sure enough there she is dragging a long-ass tangle of braided steel cables. Jake catches another corner, wobbling over the ground with Tavros's wings fluttering behind him, dust spreading out from under his feet, but then they pause and...

Flicker off. Flicker on -- three stories up from the ground, both she and Jake, holding the net open between them, and _Jake can fly and she can't_.

The pair of them plummet down to the ground, catch the rising demon between them face-on and _Jade is still falling oh Jesus_ \--

Flicker off -- just her; the demon lands with a meaty thud, and Jake touches down in a gust of wind that rattles nearby shutters.

"And you'd better stay down, Mister!" Jake says, pointing a shining finger at him like a gun, as his hair starts to wave choppily in a sea nobody else can feel.

Where is Jade, where is -- Oh. Hey. Back of partner, found, just under his nose.

"You are going to get _such_ a talking to," Jade tells Dave, without even looking at him.

Then some idiot with the trigger discipline of a Halo player lets loose a single, badly-aimed shot and all the daylight seems to go out of the street. They're lost in a canyon with wolves howling, they're alone in the dark and something is tracking them down, is going to tear them apart and mash the remains into puree, they're --

 _No. Latula can handle it,_ he tells himself, and then she does.

He briefly wonders why none of the idiots shot again while so terrified, and then he finds Karkat in the middle of them with his hand grabbing someone's wrist, forcing her down to a knee as he keeps her gun pointed up.

" _Breathe_ , you turd-flingers, if you can't handle spellwork then what are you doing stinking up this operation, where's your training, don't aim at a thing you're _not even sure is there_ ," he's ranting away, conveniently ignoring how bad Kurloz got to everyone last time this happened.

The demon in the net snarls fit to rattle the shutters again -- and then Roxy appears out of nowhere, kicks his tail further in, and tightens it like a string purse.

"Is it over? It feels too easy to be over. He's gonna burst out of the net like the Hulk, isn't he. Anyone can seal this bitch?"

Jade shrugs. "We did reinforce the net since last time, but I dunno. I'll go get Sanchez and Demmler, they can do it -- oh, wait, here they are."

Karkat checks on Dave with a glance and then trots up to the net. Dave sighs, and moves to intercept the Captain coming up at a stomp with the wave of summoner-officers.

"Why is that thing still alive?!" is the first thing Captain Vaughn says upon arriving on the scene, though he stops by the cars, well away from where Sanchez and Demmler are racing through a sand-and-ash pentacle.

"Captured works too," Dave says. "Where's Captain Egbert? I've got to ask him--"

A flicker of something cold and pitiless rushes briefly through him; the demon howls in frustration and flips around on the ground, though the net is pinned to the ground everywhere the braided steel cables touch down. Karkat, crouching by the edge of the sand line, calls out to the captive demon, short and no-nonsense, and then starts murmuring at him. The feeling abates.

"Put it _down_ ," Vaughn says, shuddering, lip curled up, and visibly steels his spine and stalks closer, trailing a pair of uniformed officers.

... Karkat promised he'd try...

Dave follows. "Sir, Captain Egbert needs to be consulted on this--"

"At this hour he's racing back to town to be with the mayor, he has better things to do than to supervise demon disposal. What's taking so long?"

"Well, it's hard to shape a spell when he keeps disrupting it," Roxy says when they stop by her to observe. "Rage peeps are pretty much pure chaos like that, sand absorbs it some but -- oh, sorry, no lecture. It's going to take a good half-hour at this rate and frankly I don't like the odds of him sitting pretty through all of it, sir."

"What's wrong with a _bullet_? Landers."

Landers lifts his gun. Dave tenses -- Karkat is in the line of fire, the people drawing the mandala are in the line of fire, they see him and retreat at a gesture but Karkat just -- stares back, disbelieving, frowning a little bit. Dave reaches across Captain Vaughn for Landers' arm.

Landers doubles over before Dave can touch him, crumples to the ground and throws up, hiccups like he can't even scream.

Dave nicks his palm on his pocket knife and slaps the beading blood across his cheek. Latula rushes through him to harry the other demon off.

People rush by to pick the guy up, drag him back. Dave looks up at the Captain, who's standing there with his eyes showing whites. Shit, he knows this guy has stood his ground before hostage takers with automatic weapons and deranged serial killers but -- demons? Not his thing, apparently. Hell.

"Let's move back a little," Jade says, and the demon in his net bursts out in deranged laughter.

" _Ain't nowhere far enough, motherfucker!_ "

Chaos, people trying to drag the Captain off, trying to keep drawing the spell pattern, waving their guns around not knowing what the fuck.

" _Kill it!_ " Dave's current headache screams as he's dragged behind a car.

"No!" Karkat yells back over the din. "I've _got_ this, okay? If you'll just shut your trap?!"

... And then of course as if the clusterfuck wasn't fucked enough another hobo bursts past the corner with a half-rusted length of pipe in hand.

"Leave our Gamzee alone!" he howls -- throws something, a bottle of beer, which explodes on the pavement harmless but loud, and three of the officers immediately turn to the problem they _can_ do something about. "You fuckin' pigs, he didn't do nothing!"

He looks three sheets to the wind but he's interfering in a pretty dangerous operation and they are intending to pin him with great prejudice.

The demon -- Gamzee? -- flops like an eel in a bucket, rears as far as the net will let him. "No, bro!" he calls out. "They'll splash your nug on these walls--"

"Sir, you put that down right now--"

"You fucking let him go!"

Is Dave surprised when the guys advancing on the hobo wobble and one of them throws up? Nope.

 _I've got them, I've got them,_ Latula murmurs, more to herself than to Dave. _I've -- hell, so many, I need more eyes--_

 _Hey, babe you can do it,_ Dave whispers back at her. She pauses, and then she smiles with his face, brave and fearless outside and inside so relieved.

_Yeah, you're right, I'mma rock this._

The surge of power he feels her fling into the spell has him blinking, and he huffs out a brief, quiet laugh. _Your Price wouldn't be confidence or something, would it._

Brief moment of silence in his head.

_Just kidding--_

_Um._ She wriggles. _Actually it's trust, but._

... Oh.

Wow. The _implications_ of that -- he has no time to think them through, he's got a field in flux to keep an eye on, but yeah, he's laughing again. All those times he just blindly gave himself over to her, thinking she might turn around and take a bite out of his soul or ask him to start murdering babies, wow. _Shit, I must be keeping you well-fed._

_You're like the most malicious buffet I ever sat my tush at, Firetruck._

Heh. Heheh. _You don't need to jet now I've figured it out, do you?_

_Nah. It'll buy you maybe less, but your credit is good with me -- crap!_

Another cloud of unfocused terror and rage bursts into existence, visible in the shudders of the people it passes over. Demmler flinches and accidentally breaches one of the sand lines; the hobo hovers uncertainly as the cops aiming to intercept him wobble.

"Everyone keep your asses parked!" Karkat bellows like the spikiest drill sergeant, sending a crackle of red racing between people, scoring the ground and not touching a single person. "Fingers off triggers, pointing _up_ , spellwork on _hold_ , gentlemen! And you with the mangy face fur, put that stick down before I put it up your ass."

He turns to the imprisoned demon and his voice gentles, everything sharp and stabby about him relaxes; even his wings loosen.

"This man is yours?"

The other demon stares at him with wild eyes that can't seem to stay, but eventually he nods.

Karkat nods back. "Alright. Trade? I will trade you not hurting any of the police for me not letting any of the police hurt you or your... human bros."

The air is still and dead.

"By hurt I mean no killing, interfering with biological processes like sleep or digestion, or injuring. Verbal abuse may happen, I sure as hell am not taking any fucking responsibility for keeping any of these assholes politically correct. Works?"

Gamzee lets out a snort that turns into a wheezy laugh. "Sure as fuck would not, either. All kinds of poetry you can find in the lowest, earthiest words, my motherfucker."

"Works?" Karkat presses.

"...Yeah. Sure."

"Then I swear -- I, Karkat Vantas, Knight of Blood, will hold up my end of the bargain, as long as you hold up yours. Which means," he adds with what Dave knows is a smile, "we're going to need to seal you or make you sleep while everyone discusses what to do with you, because otherwise you're going to freak the fuck out and fry someone's mind out of pure reflex--"

"Ain't that the pure truth," the other demon replies, chagrined.

"--and then I'll be bound to eat you alive, and I have no mustard on me."

Another rusty, breathy laugh, and the demon with Kurloz's face smiles. "Then I gotta get my swear on too -- on my own name, Gamzee motherfucking Makara."

"I'm taking the 'motherfucking' as entirely factual and representative," Karkat says lightly, and nods at Sanchez and Demmler to finish their thing.

 _No, no, no, no!_ Damara screams. _Do not have the Knight protect the fool!_

Dave flinches, startled, and then frowns. Yeah, he's not sure why it's upsetting Damara but considering how she didn't want to attack Kurloz, who worked for the Felt at the time, and she has a perfect match in their ranks, he's suspecting her goals of not being _quite_ aligned with his. Too bad, so sad, etc etc. He nudges her back.

With Gamzee not resisting any longer, Roxy and Jade can pick up sand baggies and help; the pattern is finished in barely five minutes. (During which the officers stare sideways at the hobo and the hobo sobers up enough to realize all this might have been a bad idea and discreetly scampers off.) _Containment, lethargy_ , Latula tells him of what she picks up from it, and yeah, sure enough he is soon putting his ash-stained, heavy-horned head down and falling asleep right there on the pavement, purplish skin turning bruise-dark where the iron in the net chafes.

Karkat paces his way around the spell pattern, eyeing it closely, before he deigns to give Sanchez an approving nod.

"It's sealed?" Captain Vaughn demands, straightening his jacket, eyes flinty and jaw tight.

"Yes sir," Sanchez replies.

Vaughn advances; Dave falls into step with him, just because he's going toward Karkat and Dave doesn't... like that. "Can't fuck with our heads anymore?"

"No, sir."

"Okay. Kill it."

Every summoner in the area turns to stare at him. Dave is vaguely glad of that. Karkat's mouth is opening and he looks outraged, and this is going to get bad, he can already tell.

"Sir, did you miss the part where my demon _swore on his Name_ he'd keep him alive?"

"Strider, you've been mouthing off, you need to stop doing that--"

"Okay, I think we should wait for Captain Egbert, sir, you don't seem to get the implications--"

"If you don't shut your mouth and step out of the way I will write you up for disciplinary action!" Vaughn glares at him, nostrils flaring in barely restrained anger. "And get your demon to step out of the fucking way. Or do you control it so badly it's going to attack us next?"

... Of course Karkat won't attack them next, he's forbidden to do that, of course he won't.

Dave steps into the middle. Jade is coming with her worried frown and her more diplomatic (barely) words and he has no time to wait for her. He steps in between Vaughn and Karkat (and Gamzee but who cares about Gamzee. Apart from Karkat.)

"If you trap him between his orders and his oaths, _his soul will break_."

He's angry with Karkat for swearing himself over without asking, without checking whether he could even accomplish anything -- is he trying to _die_ , is that it? Fuck.

"Where's Captain Egbert?" Karkat asks from behind him, and Vaughn snarls.

"You will order your demon to step aside _right the hell now_ , Detective, I don't care if he has to deal with the results of _your_ fucking negligence! Anders, Parker--"

Dave seizes Damara and crumbles the guns to rust in their hands.

His skin has gone all oxidized tin and old bent gears, flaking paint. Damara nestles close, suggests -- yes, good plan, he turns the pavement under one of the men's feet into sand, to keep him from trying to sneak any farther around.

No living flesh, absolutely none, but he lets her nudge the presence of metal and cloth into his mind, everything she could get at. Pretty useful to track them, anyway.

"I will have your _job_ for this," Vaughn breathes, fists almost shaking from rage.

"Okay," Dave replies, calm but for the blood beating in his temples, deafening him, Damara's low, bloodthirsty croon pooling, knotting inside his guts. "Fine. Fire me. I'm still not ordering Karkat to _crack his fucking soul_ for you. Because you're too afraid of _one piddly demon_ to--"

\-- No. Can't say that. Said too much already, shit he can't take back.

_Why not? He weak, scared shit. Making you oathbreaker. How dare he open fat shit hole mouth?_

Dave shakes his head, teeth carefully closed.

Behind him Karkat is entirely silent.

"Sir, we've got evidence that Rage demons respawn," Roxy says, meek and apologetic, from the side, and both Dave and Vaughn twitch and neither one takes his eyes off each other. "We kill him now, we might be handing him right back to the Felt. Are you sure--"

He's a little dizzy, a little buzzy still.

Not being a cop anymore. Shit. Vaughn might push it, he's so tight-lipped his mouth is turning white.

_... Fuck him._

They would have been staring at each other forever if another two cars hadn't turned the corner and come to park on the sidewalk, and--

"Where the hell have you been?" Karkat yells, exasperated, as Captain Egbert takes in the scene, the immobilized demon, Dave and Vaughn borderline chest to chest like bulls about to lock horns (and doesn't Dave feel _manly_ right now, shit, someone give him an armful of chest hair and tennis balls for testicles already.)

He is buzzing with adrenaline and resentment and things he doesn't want to look at, not yet, not ever.

When Egbert and Vaughn step away for a quiet little conference of their own he turns away to go check on Jake. Karkat watches him walk past and says nothing.

\--

So the mayor called Captain Egbert back, and while Vaughn was fouling up everything the good Captain was tied up on the phone trying to explain why no, it was _not_ more urgent that he not stand up the mayor for some impromptu press thing. Yeah, okay, cool, I'm just busy _actually_ doing the thing you're bragging to the press about _eventually_ doing, you know, taking the crazy-making demon off the streets?

Dave barely cares.

He stays with Jade shoulder to shoulder and they watch until Gamzee has been loaded into a truck and Karkat has been promised that he can visit the facility they're going to be keeping him at first thing tomorrow morning and Egbert is taking personal responsibility for that and Karkat can tear out his throat if he doesn't come through.

Anyway then they're driven back to the station, and they write some reports, and then Dave gets to shed the loving bodyguard that is his own partner and go back to his own car.

Karkat gets in the front seat, for once. He even sits on the seat instead of disappearing in the foot well.

Dave doesn't really look at him. He's got to concentrate on driving.

Right and another right and a left, two stops, a crossroad...

"... You love your job," Karkat says, quiet and a little lost. His spiky gauntlet hands are playing with the seatbelt. Dave pretends he doesn't catch Karkat's glance.

"Yeah, well," he says, and turns left.

Karkat opens his mouth and closes it again. He's going to find his words eventually and Dave doesn't. Won't. Nah.

"Could go on vacation for once. A longass vacation. Tahiti, like. Nice photo occasions, nice beaches, there's diving sites and drinks with seven layers and little umbrellas."

"You _love_ your _job_ ," Karkat repeats, because he can't pass a dead horse without whacking it a couple times to make sure it doesn't need the hospital or something. Dave closes his eyes briefly behind the shades. Thankfully they also happen to be at a red light, it'd be _maybe_ a problem otherwise.

"Okay, we could go vigilante, I guess. I bet I could rock the underwear-on-the-outside look. There's no way I wouldn't look like a totally different person with a half-mask on instead of my shades, oh fuck, I'm like a superhero already, aren't I. Also I'd again never have to file a report my entire life. Yeah, okay, sounds good, I'm sold. Knightman? Timeman? I feel like Dashingman would probably hint at the wrong set of abilities, I mean, it'd be representative of my fine visage but pedants might think it means something else and mislead themselves into thinking I'm a speedster, and I guess there's worse superheroes to be mistaken for but they're never all that--"

"If they fire you, you can't _keep me --_ can you?"

Dave loosens his hands before he manages to strangle the wheel.

"Yeah? How do you see that playing out?" he replies, staring ahead. It's a deflection, and so fucking what.

"Well," Karkat says, brow knit in doubt, "you'd lose your license, right? Isn't that what happened to your brother?"

"So I'd get a fine for unlawful possession of demon, maybe some jail time if they catch us crime-fighting under the moonlight. Can you drop it?"

Karkat twists in his seat to glower at him. Dave isn't sure what he sees in his fine profile, because he just... sighs through his nose, and then he deflates, sits back against the door to glare sullenly at Dave.

"I'll pick it back up later," he warns. Dave shrugs one shoulder. They're almost home. He's got so many movies to watch. Fuck yeah. Friday the 13th marathon.

\--

He eats ravioli straight from the can and watches bad movies.

Speeds through bad movies. Eh.

His life is not really going well. Hasn't been for a while. He's casual and careless and fun.

He's low-grade angry behind everything.

He's not angry at the Felt. It's not _personal_ with them. Must be about the only thing that isn't.

He's angry at his bosses and angry at his job and angry at Dirk for being so fucking _Dirk_ , he's angry at Damara for being Damara, he's angry at Karkat for _pushing,_ and for getting himself into messes that force Dave to jump in to drag him out without even a look back, and for--

He's angry at himself.

 _I could maybe,_ Latula says.

 _No. Thanks, babe, but no._ He shuts her, gently but firmly, out of his brain.

Click, clack, Karkat comes down from the mezzanine to use the bathroom, crosses between Dave and the TV. Water noises. Click, clack.

Stop. Dave turns his head to look an instant before the couch dips, and the demon is climbing onto the cushions, casually just happening not to look straight at Dave.

"Can we still not do it now," Dave asks, without too much hope.

"We weren't doing it until you started doing it," Karkat replies cynically, and then shrugs, avoids his eyes. "Yeah, whatever, I'm tired too."

... Well. Good. Dave stares at the TV.

He's expecting a comment, a request to explain what's been happening, some heckling maybe, but Karkat stays quiet.

Then he sighs, and leans against Dave's shoulder all at once.

He's heavy, solid; the edge of his shoulder plate is digging into Dave's shoulder.

It's warm. Not squishy, but.

"... Hungry?" he asks, and tries to... this is kind of, almost physical affection, he could do it for that, maybe. If they keep it slow and. Careful. That. If Karkat puts his arms around him maybe and. He doesn't want to starve Karkat, and the dude has been using his powers today and needs --

Maybe if Dave manages sex they can cuddle afterwards.

"Mnh?" Karkat says, and shifts so he's sideways, so his jaw rests on Dave’s shoulder. "No, I'm good."

Shit.

"Okay," Dave says.

Okay.

"What are we watching?" Karkat asks, five or ten minutes of senseless gore and random cheerleaders later.

"Fuck, I don't even know." Dave changes channels. Yay for surreal music clips. Better. Easier to not-follow at least.

"...Thought Egbert was around," Karkat says, voice veiled in tiredness. "That one was my mistake."

Dave still doesn't want to talk about it, but they're going to have to do it at some point. It's... good that Karkat admits his part in it. He guesses.

"Still did it without checking with anyone first," Dave replies. Pauses, sneaks him a glance. "Were you testing me?" Seeing if... what? Dave would have his back? If Dave would order him to disregard that dolphin-assed wobbledick? If Dave would...

Karkat weighs his answer before he gives it, slow and measured. "The testing was a side effect of doing what I needed to be doing anyway." He slants Dave a look from under his bangs, upper eyes almost closed. "...I don't _get_ you."

"Yeah, I'm a mystery. Have you tried asking?" Dave says, because he's the kind of assturd who loves to shoot himself in the foot if he can get a good zinger off it.

Karkat snorts, turns his face so that it's against Dave’s neck and oh. Breath. Lips. His heart kicks.

Kicks again when Karkat makes a little intrigued 'hmm' and presses his nose to Dave’s skin to inhale.

Then he shuffles his weight a little and returns to propping his chin on Dave's shoulder.

"Okay, sure. Explain why you don't punish me. Everyone expects you to. _I_ expected you to. Is it still your weird guilt thing about tricking me into contracting with you?"

Dave closes his eyes. After a few seconds he takes off his shades, drops them on the couch.

It's so close to physical affection. Might be physical _contentment_ , but Dave knows it's body warmth and the rush of blood in his veins. He could be a life-sized flesh puppet and achieve the same effect.

"I'm in love with you," he says, because he knows Karkat won't get it.

Wow, listen to that silence.

"It fucks with me, having to force you. Knowing you don't -- feel the same. It really fucks with me."

He rubs a hand against his face.

"I am hella not enjoying it," he concludes, to the sound of still more silence--

"What love?"

Oh, wow. _Nice_. Here Dave thought it couldn't get worse. "Fuck. See. I knew you wouldn't -- just because you've got the vocabulary, what do demons _get_ of--"

Karkat sits up to stare at him and Dave misses the warmth against his side, the cold and absence like a slap in the face.

"Of _course_ I don't get it; _what_ love? _Love_?" he says, and it sounds like a Name, it resonates; it's... watching-from-afar, never-approaching, happy-they-exist-whether-they-thrive-or-fail.

"Love?" (binary suns in a stable orbit, racing in a neverending spiral through the universe. Oh.)

"Or maybe," he adds, biting, teeth bared, " _love_?"

This one comes through as 'courting your own destruction.' Dave stares. "... Say that one again?"

"Love," Karkat repeats, still staring right into him with the intensity of a red sun.

It's a terrible, craving admiration, please-use-me/use-me-up. It's subsume me, it's let me merge into you, it's _devour me_...

"Is... that it?" Dave says, still rolling it around in his head. "Those are the types of love you can feel...?"

"Of course that's not _it!_ There's the lesser love--" (coming together, summer vacation, separate bright and laughing and happy), "and there's the love of sundering--" (live, live, _live_ ) "--and _see!_ " he explodes, a hand flung up, wings canted like he's about to do battle. "You don't understand any of them, how am I fucking meant to know what yours implies?!"

Dave nods, slowly. "I like the stable orbit one. But it's not..." It doesn't feel right, either. "... I do want to touch you," he says, and his voice breaks. "I want -- maybe it's more like the other one in practice. I want the summer fling that never ends and I want -- I want to fucking _die_ rather than hurt you more and I -- shit." He rubs a fist at his eyes. " _Shit_."

Love of sundering, huh? Love where you could watch them win or you could watch them crash and burn and think the exact same 'what a gorgeous disaster.' He's not even surprised at the way Karkat watches him, wary, absolutely unbending. Dave sure as fuck wouldn't want those aimed his way either.

Maybe it's different when you're loved back. Maybe it's welcome then.

Being loved in the human way is not that much better when it's unwelcome, really.

"It's not really any of those. It's just _like_ some, some parts, some sides of them. It's not. I'm human, it's not--"

"Yeah," Karkat says with terrible gentleness, "I can tell."

"Can we have the conversation about Gamzee instead," Dave asks the ceiling. Karkat ignores it utterly, too busy frowning his anthropologist in the middle of savages frown, the one that purses his lips a little and squints his left eyes more than his right ones all lopsided and cute.

"What is it like, then? Mating -- what, fondness? Mammalian pair-bonding? I'm not equipped to carry your offspring, much less rear it, that's some misaimed feeling."

Dave lets out a wet, raw laugh.

"What do you expect from--"

"Nothing, alright? I can't start expecting _shit_ from you, I don't have the fucking right -- don't bring up your Name. It's abuse, okay? It's abuse to force someone to stay with you and do what you say or else and it's even worse to pretend you're forcing it on them because you care -- and I don't care if some abusers think they're in love, it's gross and it's wrong -- _I'm_ wrong--"

"Oh, no, don't start to leak, we were having a perfectly reasonable conversation like two logical sentient beings -- hey!"

He's tired. Angry and tired and it hurts, but at least it's all out now! (At least he's asking absolution from the victim without taking a single step to fix it first but hey.)

"I'm going to bed," he says, already standing up. His nose is already clogging up. It's unreal how often Karkat brings him to tears.

Karkat _snarls_. "Stop being a fucking martyr for one fucking second and stand your ground!"

" _What_ ground?!" Dave snaps back, whirling around to glare. Karkat is up on one knee on the edge of the coffee table -- almost high enough to meet Dave's eyes properly like a fellow human being.

"So that's it? You're just going to make a declaration of, of _feelings_ , and then fuck off and pretend it never happened? You told me to ask, I'm asking, now sit your flesh cushions down and _explain!_ "

"Why do you need me to explain?! It's not--"

"Shut up!" Karkat barks right over him. "Not my business? You make it my business every time you foul up a perfectly workable professional relationship--"

"Do you mean _slavery_?!"

"--With your goddamn _wibbling!_ And -- you know what. Fuck this."

Dave blinks, unbalanced -- hurt.

Then Karkat grabs his wrist, twists, yanks and Dave ends up on his back on the couch -- and then a demon armored like a pocket tank lands on his midriff.

Oof.

"Karkat--"

"Order me off or talk, but either way stop _waffling_."

Shit. Fucking _hell_.

He throws an arm across his face. Much better, he can almost pretend he can't feel Karkat straddling him that way.

It _is_ better.

He's getting his sleeve wet. Welp.

"...Okay, shoot."

He's not sure if Karkat doesn't know what he wants to ask, or if he's surprised Dave folded so fast. It takes him a few seconds, armored hands on Dave's chest to brace.

"What does... that type of love imply? Exactly. I've been watching tons of movies but some of the cultural shortcuts are confusing and none of them really examine all those not so basic assumptions and... I don't know. I feel like I'm missing huge chunks of context."

"Romantic love -- not familial or friendship. It's -- you want to spend time together," he says, lifting his arm so he can draw vague shapes in the air with them. "You want the other person to be happy -- when you're in, when you feel that, if they feel a thing, usually you feel it too, and your own feelings are kind of... stronger? It can be good and bad." A helpless shrug. "The ethical angle would be a problem either way but I dunno if I'd be a goddamn snot fountain over your situation if I didn't..."

He said it once and it won't come out again; he thought it'd be easier now that it's on the table already.

He pinches his lips, tries again. "You smile and I want to smile too. I want to do things that make you smile -- only it's not my place. I want to do things that make you happy with me, _because_ of me -- because, you do things and I like them and I want it mutual, yeah? It's not like your... watching from a distance thing. It's not that."

"....Mm?"

"I want us to be a team and to help each other and I want you to enjoy me because I enjoy you, but you enjoy nothing here and I'm keeping you here by force and it's fucking horrible. I want it to stop. If you were human I'd just stop hanging out with you and wait it out but here we fucking are."

"... Ah."

He makes himself look at Karkat. TV colors dance on a side of his face, the other one in shadows. He's watching Dave right back and he has never seemed more alien, more remote.

"I'm not hearing mentions of helping rear your offspring," he says clinically, and Dave both flinches and groans.

Fucking _figures_. "Raising sprogs is a thing for people it's _already a life goal for_. If you've got other life goals, ideally your lover would help you with those instead, I dunno. Or you'd break up because -- love isn't enough. Sometimes. I guess."

He almost rests his hand on Karkat's thigh when he's done waving it around, just because he's touched him dozens of times before, has gotten used to it being a thing; when Karkat is straddling him it's okay to fondle. It's not the same today. He ends up folding it awkwardly against his chest.

"Sometimes people just aren't compatible," he finishes awkwardly, "even if they want to be."

"We do have relationships," Karkat tells him, wry but not mean. "I'm familiar with that particular pitfall. Remind me to tell you all about Terezi and Vriska one day. Or hell, just Vriska and Tavros, but that one was pretty one-sided. Talk about people who should never have bred ever."

"Heh."

Dave watches Karkat watch him, and wonders what he's thinking about. If it's awkward for him too, to be straddling him like that and it's nothing like either hugging or sex.

"Karkat," he says eventually, quiet and tired.

"What do you want to do about it? Ideally."

Can't they be done already. He likes the way Karkat bites into something like a bulldog and never lets go until it's dead, in theory, but it's so exhausting to deal with. "Ideally all the skeevy job-mandated obedience bullshit falls off when you spontaneously transform into a human," Dave says, monotone, "which is bullshit when it's the fact that you're not human that makes you _you_."

(Ideally he releases Karkat, but Karkat decides to stay.)

"Yeah, you're bullshitting."

"Yeah." A sigh. "Disincarnating you -- there's no way the brass will give the okay without a major battle, and even then, nothing is certain. I'm talking involving the press and making a major stink about it. And then the program we're alpha testing will be sunk either way, and the thing is, it's not a bad program in itself, it's just -- you were a bad fit. A really bad fit."

Karkat glares. "Hey, I'm awesome. I'm terrifying and powerful and your program should be glad to have me."

"You don't want to be here."

"... Yeah, but I'm still fucking awesome."

"Yeah," Dave agrees softly, because now he's got nothing to lose for doing it. "You're pretty cool."

Karkat looks thrown, blinking with his upper eyes and staring with the lower, which is funny and adorable because usually they kind of move in tandem.

"I could get it started, if you want. It'll be an uphill battle, but we could get it started."

Be kind of a relief. Also kind of horrible, but at least eventually it'd be over. In a few years.

"Or I could talk Rose and Dirk into helping disincarnate you without asking for permission. Faster, no risk of being cockblocked by red tape."

"You'd never work as a cop again."

Dave shrugs. "Vigilante still sounds good. I could be a photographer by day. Have art galleries."

"We're ignoring the Felt here," Karkat points out, hook-tipped fingers splayed over Dave’s ribcage. Dave briefly imagines him plunging all of them down in between the bones, prying him open, and then berates himself for being melodramatic. He's not even worrying about being scratched. "Bet your collection of mediocre films they'd find a way to get to me. They wouldn't try so hard to bump you off if you having a hold on me wasn't a pretty big obstacle."

... Fuck. Yeah, there's that.

"And I'm your only reliable means of attack right now. Latula is purely defense, Aradia is mostly support with a side dish of instant kill, and Damara would rather be working for the enemy. You cut me loose, whether they grab me or not, you can't fight anymore, and they implement their plan -- the one they seem to think is worth pissing off the entire police force openly."

He sounds cynical, looks unsurprised. Dave cringes, a bit. "... If you're willing to wait until after the Felt are dealt with..."

"Hm."

"... Yeah, okay. Fuck."

Karkat stares down at him, all glowing red eyes and flat-lined mouth, heavy brows and teeth.

"What I'm hearing here is, you can't stand having control of me, and if you could free me, you would... But right now you conveniently can't."

Yeah. That's the thing, isn't it? Dave twists himself into knots about this bullshit and how intolerable he finds it, and then limps along, tolerating it.

"... I will. If you ask. I will. I'll go to Rose right now. Tonight? I bet she's still awake."

Huh, he's leaking again. Karkat tracks the tears falling down his temples, says nothing, doesn't change expressions at all. Dave remembers his voice gentling for Gamzee, for Erisol; it burns.

"You have my Name," Karkat says, quiet and cool like a brush of silk. "You'll always have my Name."

Dave finds nothing to answer to that but "Sorry."

Because -- yeah? He will. He knows it in intimate, exquisite detail, it's burned into his mind -- lava flowing like blood, or blood like lava, thick and bubbling; obsidian islands, brittle and sharp, gleaming. Desolate and in ruins but still alive despite it all. The contract might break and Karkat might fuck right off to the depths of the hell plane, but Dave will always be capable of dragging him back, if he tries hard enough.

And then Karkat leans in, staring, weirdly intense. Dave blinks.

"Give me yours."

"What?"

"You don't like the imbalance, and you can't cut me free. Alright. Give me your Name."

... Karkat having as deep a grip on Dave as Dave has on him. Willing and able to give as good as he gets, to undo any damage Dave might order done, to...

It's ridiculous and suicidal and --

"You know humans can't," he says, and his throat knots up and he sobs, just once. Why'd Karkat even say that? That asshole. "I _can't_."

"What if there was a way?" Karkat asks, inches from his face, soft like a secret.

Dave stares, and stares some more, and can't believe -- everyone knows flesh roots the soul, entangles, _hides_ it, you can't know a human's soul name until the instant they _die_ , and then they unravel anyways.

He doesn't know what he's feeling, if it's grief or hope. It's a knot under his breastbone, squeezing down on his lungs, it's all the hair on his arms standing up, his hands and feet suddenly feeling cold.

Handing over his soul. Just -- entrusting it to the demon he enslaved, the demon who feeds on other souls, who wants to go home.

"... Then I'd have to call Rose," he concludes. His lashes are glued together; it takes some blinking to see the way Karkat's face has closed up but it doesn't take seeing to feel him rearing back, shifting his weight to get up.

Dave grabs his wrists.

"I'd have to call Rose, to warn her, in case -- she has to put me down -- or if you kill me, so she isn't the one who has to find my corpse."

He licks his dry lips. He's trembling.

"There's really a way...?"

Karkat slides off his lap, tugs a wrist free; Dave lets him go. He stretches across the table, picks up Dave's phone.

Dave sits up and takes it.

His hand is shaking. He should take the time to think this through. He should weigh the consequences (Karkat kills and eats him -- at least he'd be _done_ ; Karkat enslaves him -- he's adopted Dave's people, he wouldn't use Dave against them (until they pushed it) (wishful thinking, how can he ever be sure); Karkat... does nothing with it...)

'Courting your own destruction' was maybe apt after all.

He brings up Rose's number, starts typing up a quick message.

**yo sis im giving my soul name to karkat**  
**see you on the flip side maybe**  
**xoxoxoxoxo**

He looks up at Karkat, who's watching him and looks like a statue, nothing like the snarling, eyerolling, pouting, smirking menace he knows.

He hits send.

Karkat takes the phone out of his hands, delicately, turns it off, and puts it back on the table. Then he reaches out and brushes his hand against Dave's temple, and caresses his hair.

Dave's hands are clutching each other between his knees so tight his knuckles are about to crack. "...So...? How'd...? Karkat? How do I. How?"

Karkat wraps an arm around him and pulls him closer -- it's a hug, he thinks, but Karkat doesn't...

"It's not actually possible, dumbass," he tells Dave, muffled against the tender side of his neck.

"... Oh."

"Blood," he says, "is the element of bonds and oaths."

It's so far from anything Dave expected to hear next, he doesn't know what to do with it. "--Oh. Huh."

"I protect bonds," Karkat says, briefly peevish. "I am _not bound_."

"Huh," Dave says, bewildered, being hugged. "Yeah. Guess that would grate."

"Mmh."

"... So you...? I mean. What did. Why...?"

"Now if you tell me, for example," and his voice shifts to a nasal parody of Dave's drawl, "'we're redesigning the contract between us, and it's _totally_ going to be more in your favor, but you've got nothing to protect yourself from being fucked over even worse, but I won't abuse it...!'"

Dave winces.

"Well, now maybe I'll believe it."

He butts his forehead against Dave's.

"Am I to understand you want your contract redesigned," Dave drones, a quick, automatic papering over the bubbling mess of feelings about to erupt all over the place.

Karkat just... tested his word. How much it was worth. How far he'd...

"Gee, that'd be swell," Karkat says dryly, "especially if I actually get to negotiate."

"Taking a leaf from Kankri's book now?" Dave gives a dry chuckle; it scrapes a little, his throat is raw.

" _All_ his ideas can't be horrible. It's a statistical impossibility. If only because there's got to be a chaos-causing demon somewhere messing with the fabric of the universe until black comes up white."

Dave nods slowly, yeah, sure, that makes perfect sense, and wraps an arm around his waist. He keeps his touch light, he's not sure if... he's not sure.

"Not that I mind, but why are you cuddling? It's kind of... mixed signals?"

Karkat nips him. Dave feels like he should have seen it coming. "What's mixed about it?"

"See, if you were human, I'd take it as, yes, Dave, I'd love to be your boyfriend--"

"You didn't even ask me to be your boyfriend--"

"Would you even say yes if I did?"

"No," Karkat replies offhandedly. "Because I don't understand shit about it and also you haven't even been courting me, do you think I'm that easy?"

Dave sighs loudly through his nose. His other arm is creeping up Karkat's back to press between his wings. He's so, so warm. He's here deliberately.

"Do you want me to court you?"

"Do whatever you want, I don't care. It's just nice to finally be able to understand what that thing was. Just a fleshy asshole reproductive tactic, okay, whatever."

Dave starts laughing against his temple, silent, his whole body shaking with it. "You say that, and all I hear is oh please yes, seduce me with flowers and chocolates."

"--Wait, that's right, your courting processes have chocolate. _Fuck_ yes. Does eating them obligate me to jack shit?"

Dave's mouth does a maneuver he did not authorize it to do. "Nah."

"Okay, then. I'm sure after enough Hersheys I'll have an epiphany of love and suddenly come up human gravid."

"I would love every single one of your myriad hellspawn and ruin myself on their college funds," Dave promises solemnly. As solemnly as he can when he can't stop smiling, which is stupid because Karkat didn't say he'd love him back -- not even _like_ him back, he didn't say he forgives him, he didn't say...

He's on Dave's lap.

He told Dave what Blood friggin' _does_.

"... So..." he mumbles, tracing the soft edge of his wing membrane where it disappears between armor plates.

"Hm?"

"Why'd you trust me with that. I don't get it. I did nothing, I just--"

"You'd have gone through with it." Karkat shrugs, leans back to look at Dave, knees bracketing his hips on the couch.

"Didn't give you an oath."

"... Bonds, oaths, and _commitment_. You were pretty determined to give me your Name." He looks briefly awkward, eyes darting away from Dave's face, and _almost_ squirm. "--But if you want to give me an oath," he adds, eyes sparkling with secret amusement, "I'll take it."

"Um," Dave says very intelligently -- he is not at all distracted by that look on Karkat's face, that faint, closemouthed smirk, those hooded eyes. "Yeah, sure. What oath do you want?"

"Right now? Hm. How about..." He hums, black lips briefly pursed. "We'll redesign our contract no later than seven days after the Felt have been dealt with, barring hospital stays, mental trauma that renders either of us incapable of sound judgment -- to be determined by Terezi, _not_ Latula, Latula has just about half the horses in this race -- and of course barring the death of one or both of us."

"Yeah, sold," Dave says, watching his lips move, all the little folds in them and the points of bear trap teeth behind. "Uh, did you need me to say it back? Or prettier, I guess."

"... You're the most annoying slob I have ever met. You're so _loose_ I don't get how you've never gotten chewed."

"I'm loose in the good way though."

"With the way I have to rub up on your meat costume before you'll even consider feeding me? Not _even_."

He bounces off Dave's lap in the next second and Dave is left bereft. It doesn't hurt now though. It's just a twinge, and then he pouts, tries not to laugh. He's smiling, all shaky, stupidly hopeful. "Aw, c'mon, cuddles? I'll swear all pretty."

Karkat snorts at him, wings flicking. "No, now I want dinner, we ate nothing and I'm hungry."

"You had candy."

"Yeah, and now I'm hungry even _worse_ , and also queasy. Make me pasta," he says, and then he pauses in the kitchen doorway and blinks all his eyes. "--Oh. Oh, hey."

"Yeah?" Dave asks, already halfway there like a good manservant.

"So hey," Karkat asks, turning away with really badly faked casualness, "a knight protects, right?"

"Yeah?"

"And Blood is..."

"...Oaths, bonds and commitments?"

"And I'm hungry."

Dave blinks for like five minutes, fridge open and butter in hand. Okay, maybe not that long.

Karkat looks irritated and embarrassed, it's funny. "Come _on_. You're too stupid to live, did your twin use you as a stalking goat and fed on everyone trying to relieve this plane of existence of your idiocy? Types of interpersonal bonds, chop chop."

... Oh god, is he trying to make Dave guess his...? "Friendship, matrimony, familial? Um. Professional partnerships?"

"Yeah, good, now bonds between more people than that."

"Uh. Teamwork, extended family, community--"

Karkat clears his throat, and pours half the fucking package of dry pasta into the pan.

"Community?"

"Hey, hand me the salt."

"Protect the community."

" _Salt_ , buttmonkey."

Dave stares in pure, unfeigned disbelief. Karkat flicks his tail and rustles his wings just so, the _smug son of a black hole and a metaphysical fart_. "Your price is to protect the community?!" he yells, and chucks the salt box at his head. "Are you shitting me?! I've been doing that all along!"

Karkat catches the salt, and smirks at him. "Well then, it shouldn't be hard to keep doing it, yeah? Good, I've been having fucking _cravings_."

"Don't you smirk at me!" Dave throws his hands up. "I could have been feeding you like that all along! You could be _obese with power_ by now!"

Karkat scrunches his brows, clears his throat, friggin' _pouts_. "Yeah, um, well. Don't underestimate the sheer power of spite, okay--"

"Are you a _masochist_?!"

"Hey, what's that human proverb again, something about a pot and a kettle?"

Dave grabs a handful of drippy uncooked pasta out of the pan (thankfully cold, didn't Karkat know the water needs to boil _first_ ) and chucks it at his head.

Then he grabs his face and kisses him right on the mouth.

It's hasty and clumsy at first, and Karkat nips him, but then he laughs against Dave's mouth and Dave maybe cries a little. Like, one tear tops. Yeah.

Karkat makes him stop so he can turn on the fire under the pasta, but when he's done he lets Dave back him against the counter and seal their mouths together, lets Dave press against his body and explore his mouth long and powerful and slow.

His arms drape around Dave's neck, loose and casual, his wings come around to envelop Dave's arms, cup his sides, and he hums indulgently into Dave's mouth when Dave traces his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

Dave remembers he didn't message Rose back with a "nvm false alarm" when she kicks the door down.


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short one, for several reasons. For one, it hella doesn't fit with the following scenes, the moods and topics are totally different and there's even a small timeskip. 
> 
> When I envisioned this story it was actually two stories, because Dave learning Karkat's Price was pretty emotionally climaxey but at the same time there's a ton of villains doing their villainous thing and they're not done yet, so that meant I needed a sequel where those plot threads got tied off too, right. So then I was like ok no, a sequel is stupid, I'm just going to keep writing across the gap! And I produced this scene, which is p nice but also feels pretty "fallout" for the previous chapter, and after that the fic was like "nope this is not working, figure out something else" and after that i was hit by the writer's block from hell and had to delete several scenes of suck and badness and go in frustrated circles a lot.
> 
> I have things mostly figured out by now, but my writing output is still barely a fifth or a tenth of what it usually is, so I can't promise updates will resume at speed, but at the same time I now have the fic planned out to the end. There might scill be details or scenes tripping me up, because things in my head don't always end up the same as the things i write down and there can be repercussions on the rest of the planned stuff, but there are no more huge stupid plotholes, either.
> 
> Still, next chapter is missing *one* scene, so hey. *crosses fingers liek whoa*

"Coming!" Dave yells, but by the time he tears himself away from Karkat and gets out of the kitchen Rose has already kicked the security chain clean off the frame. Whoops.

At least she had the keys, so she didn't have to tear the door entirely out, but it bumps into the wall and leaves a mark in the plaster. Dave stares at it for a second with mild consternation, and then Rose is on him, grabbing both his elbows and getting right into his face, her eyes Terezi's blind, burnt-out red. Her hair is mussed, wild.

" _What did you do_."

Welp. "Nothing?" Dave starts.

Rose yells out a "Lie!" in Terezi's shrill, scratchy voice.

"I didn't -- Rose, it's fine, Karkat was trolling me."

" _Oh!_ " Kankri says from the door, sounding both shocked and offended. Dave glances over his sister's shoulder, and finds him with a hand lifted off the ground in mid-prissy-step, mouth open. John is standing outside in the corridor, and is craning his neck to look over Kankri's half-flared wings.

Awgh. Jesus. Exactly what he needed, an audience. He is the dweebiest. He doesn't even manage to mind right now. He just kissed Karkat. Karkat was kissing back. Everything is wonderful, and the plaster will deal with it.

He hears claws on the floor behind him, Karkat padding up to the two of them. When Dave glances back he finds his demon with one eyebrow up, lips pinched like he doesn't want to laugh at them, at least not openly, and it makes Dave smile. He smothers it as quickly as he can.

"Yeah, um. Turns out my soul name is still a great unknown to everyone in this room."

Kankri clears his throat, and then shakes his head and steps forward, glaring at Karkat. "Being taken in by such a basic trick is surprising of you, Detective, but perhaps not entirely unexpected. But that _you_ saw fit to joke about it in such a careless manner--"

"What, don't tell me _you_ were taken in?" Karkat replies; he sounds like he went to sleep for an hour and woke up on Christmas day to a treefull of capitalistic glee-inducing trinkets and treats. "Oh my god. What do your seer eyes see, Legolas? Were you showering and splashed a whole bottle of prissy shampoo in them? Metaphysical hot pepper? Did you catch fifth-dimensional pinkeye -- ow!"

Kankri has just turned on his knee to slap Karkat's side with the flat of his tail. It makes for a nice, sharp clap. Karkat stumbles to the side, making this hilarious startled face, and Dave laughs, but also tries to step toward them, get in the middle.

Rose's grip brings him up short. She's not budging.

"Um, guys?" John says from the doorway. "So what's going on, really?"

Rose is still staring at Dave's face like she's planning the best way to peel off every inch of skin and flesh attached to it so she can dig out the thoughts he's got to have somewhere behind. The sun points in her eyes stand out, though Dave is pretty sure he's not seeing the magic in them; they're just more obvious with that half-wild, great-owl stare. He stares back, helplessly.

"Thank you for the lift, John," she says, without breaking eye contact. "I think this discussion is one for family."

John looks dubious, but then he looks at Dave and the face he makes is a bit strange; Dave wonders what he looks like, apart from shades-less -- oh. Wait. He cried. Does it still show?

"Yeah, okay. I'll see you guys tomorrow," John says, half like a promise and half like a threat.

He waves his fingers, and considerately closes the door behind him, and Dave is alone with a pissed-off Rose and a ticked-off Kankri and... Okay, Karkat is still looking smug and amused, even despite the tail-slapping. Dave snorts despite himself.

Then Rose's nostrils flare and her jaw muscles roll and yeah, he's about to get punched in the face here.

"Um. Sis? Rose. It's fine. I'm okay--"

"You've got a captain out for your blood, but you're okay," Rose says, bitingly sharp. "You're texting me to tell me the _awesome_ news of you putting yourself at the mercy of a demon just _because_ , but you're okay. _You've been fucking crying,_ _ **but you're okay!**_ "

Her upper lip is curled up and she looks utterly terrifying, about to blow up into chunks all over the place and take out his eye on the way. One of her hands has let go to slash through the air; the other one is digging into his biceps with all its long, lacquered nails.

" _What's_ okay about _any of this?!_ "

"Karkat doesn't hate me," Dave replies, dumbly, because he's dumb, and also he's stunned too stupid to find anything else to explain it with that would both be true and leave him with _some_ privacy. Because. Well.

"I don't?" Karkat says, but when Dave's head whips around to stare down at him he's still looking amused. "Let's say we came to a new understanding that might be quite beneficial for us both."

"He told me his Price," Dave adds, because yes, thanks, best demon, good segue, and look, Rose, there is good news.

Rose sneers, releases his arm, her chin up and pointed in challenge. "Well, that's _great_. Positively fantastic. Is being passively suicidal part of it? No, wait, I do think you've finally graduated out of the passive part. Congratulations."

Oh, Jesus. "I'm not--"

"You're _not_? Do you want a list? I could give you five incidents based on the last five months alone, Dave!"

"Hey! It's not--" He swallows the 'that bad' because she might murder him. He wonders if that'd count as another suicide attempt. Haha. Ha.

"Did Aradia not take enough years off your lifespan, maybe? How about the dead Dave from that other timeline? Leaping head first into traps because Jade or Karkat or whoever else were in danger, which means you get to risk your comparatively worthless hide with zero forethought or precautions?"

He winces, says nothing. Wow. Harsh.

Rose deflates, shoulders drooping, eyes losing their terrifying battle shine, hands hanging against her thighs.

"You need to see someone, Dave. Preferably a professional. I can't -- for all that I talk about my interest in -- I'd be horrible at it, but you still need to..."

"I'm fine now," Dave says, as gentle as he can. "I -- yeah, the situation with Karkat was kinda wearing on me, but it's cool now, we're cool, I feel better already. Like seriously I'm not even fussed about that dickhead Vaughn."

"Such a brittle sense of self is _not_ fine," Rose snaps back. "What happens if Karkat takes it back? You'll be right back in the dumps! You can't have your emotional state--"

"Hey," Dave snaps back. "Lay off with the bullshit shrink stuff, okay? Karkat won't be taking it back. We talked about redesigning his contract so it's better balanced. Surprise, I get to not feel like a rapist slave-owner anymore! Wow, no, you're right, that was a stupid thing to feel shitty about."

Rose briefly looks... taken aback, remorseful, and then she scowls again. "So shitty you were trying to die is not a normal level of shitty. Or a healthy one."

"I was _not_ \--" Dave huffs, rakes both hands through his hair out of frustration. "Okay, I've been taking risks, but they all were for pretty good reasons, and if you've forgotten this ain't exactly a safe job anyway and--"

Karkat punches Dave in the hip, shelled knuckles impacting straight on with his hipbone. Dave folds in two almost sideways.

"Ow, what the fuck! How is that mild harm, you dick? Jesus, I'm gonna have a bruise the size of my face."

"You were trying to die?" Karkat asks, low and dangerous.

Dave blinks down at him, still bent over with his hands on his hip. Their faces are maybe five inches apart.

"... Dude, of course not, if I died you'd die with me, I'm not that much of an asshole," he says, gentle, reassuring, and then he hears the actual words that are coming out of his mouth.

Rose's mouth is pinched bloodless-white and she has her chin up like 'hah, see!'. Her eyes are overbright.

"Hey, no, I don't want to die, I just, it was situational, was all -- statistical clustering? Yeah, that. Oh god, Rose, don't cry--"

She bursts into tears, a sob forcing its way out of her throat. Dave grabs for her shoulders, doesn't know if he should hug her -- how do you hug a sister again, no, he knows this one, oh fuck, what does he do?!

"No, hey -- I'm fine now, I'll see someone, they'll tell you I'm fine, I'll go see the shrink tomorrow I swear to you -- Rose, fuck, don't do that, I'll jump out of the window oh hell that's probably not a good joke right now. It _was_ a joke, you know that, right?"

She nods, eyes closed, cheeks wet, and then she leans slowly, curls until her forehead presses against his shoulder, like it hurts to move into him.

He holds her.

"... Do you want to stay for dinner? We're making pasta, with like three tons of cheese, and we don't have bacon today which is a travesty but I thought we could compensate with even more cheese. Sound good?"

"I'm staying the _night_ ," Rose says back, face still buried against his shoulder. (The cloth is wet.) "My ride just left."

"Oh, right." He fingercombs her hair a little, cautiously. Air Rufioh did a number on her usually smooth locks, they're full of tiny knots that won't untangle.

"Ow. Leave it, I'll brush them out." Rose lifts her head off his chest, sighing wetly. From the side Karkat holds out a marshmallow, face dubious and mildly distressed in about equal measures; he looks like he's about to scamper off, it's a bit hilarious.

He's offering her one of his marshmallows, the bag still held tight to his chest. Dave loves him so stupidly much.

"... Thank you, Karkat." She takes it from his hand. "Implicit contract being I stop crying over everything?"

"That'd be nice," Karkat says, trying for sarcastic and insincere, and missing by a mile. "This is completely disturbing and I am completely disturbed. Good job traumatizing me into doing your bidding, now let's see if it worked on your dumbass sibling."

"Um. Yeah, okay, shrink tomorrow," Dave promises, and rubs the back of his neck a little. Rose's eyes are back to normal, Terezi gone -- or as close to normal as they can be with the etch-a-sketch sun in the iris and the cornea reddened from crying, but, well.

"Good," Rose says, "because I'm not above guilting you via reminding you how shitty it makes me feel that you got tangled up in summoning Karkat because you didn't want me to summon Sollux. You overprotective, self-sacrificial _idiot_."

She pops the marshmallow into her mouth and chews vengefully.

"Well, to be fair it did involve inversion," Dave points out. "Like, _prolonged_ inversion." Sollux is a Mage of Doom, which means the only way a Seer of Light can use him outside of a circle where the pattern does the energy-flipping thing for them is by flipping their own seerness right over. "And -- no, _okay_ , it's not risky so long as he's not corporeal and he doesn't _ride_ you, and once he was in his own meat costume he wouldn't be tugging at you constantly, but I asked Dirk and I asked your mom and there are still like zero fucking trustworthy studies on the topic of long-term damage--"

"There _so_ are, Dave--"

"--when the summoner _already_ friggin' inverted herself the one time. Like, what if now your soul has creases like a bent sheet of plastic, and it just, you know, every time it's easier until you just split in two at the seams and okay this metaphor could be better but I think it illustrates my point pretty well."

He crosses his arms and purses his mouth. She scowls back, and then sighs. "I guess, but Dirk was also willing to do it--"

"Dude, three of his regulars have overlaps with other officers, and the last one is Kurloz; can you imagine that?" Dave shudders. "Fuck, I totally can. Eugh. On the upside, the Felt wouldn't have had him."

"On the downside," Kankri points out, "they would have had us. No, it had to be the two of you," he adds absently.

Rose's eyes flicker with Terezi-red, but she doesn't comment.

"I guess that _would_ have been pretty bad," Dave says. "Nah, I'm good with how this turned out, if the Felt was the alternative."

Yeah. Unrequited pining and all.

It's not even unrequited anymore -- oh, well, it kinda is, but like... Not in a mean way or a cold way or a _rejection_ way, and not in a way that's all like 'don't even bring it up you trash how dare you put that on him.' Karkat doesn't get his type of love but he didn't tell him to fuck off either, right? He doesn't mind. Dave doesn't know if he'll ever... how they'll manage, if this will evolve into anything else, but it has already evolved into 'yeah we're both aware you're a doofus with weird feelings and I'm cool with that.'

A weird hissing noise comes from the kitchen. Karkat takes off. "Fuck! The pasta!"

Whoops. Sounds like the pot boiled over.

Dave follows Karkat to the kitchen. Rose follows Dave, and then Kankri decides to take residence in the kitchen doorway. Could be worse, because three people is definitely maximum capacity if two of them still want to be able to move around along the counter.

"Okay, strain it -- here's the thing -- and then we can bake it." He retrieves the colander for Karkat, and then one of the big dishes that go in the oven, which he has forgotten to pre-heat. Fuck. He discreetly starts it up and then starts buttering up the inside of the dish.

"Is it going to be enough for four people?" Karkat asks, frowning in concentration as he fights not to let any pasta bit escape into the sink. "Doesn't look like it will..."

"Kankri doesn't eat pork," Rose points out as she starts rummaging in their fridge.

"Indeed I don't, as pigs are much too sentient for it to be right in any way. Did you know they recognize themselves in a mirror, and experience sorrow and--"

"Dude, I just done told y'all we don't have none at the moment, and anyway I don't want to hear this filth. This is a bacon-loving household. All hail the smoked ham. Keep your heathen proselytism out."

Karkat nods very seriously, eyebrows up, lips pinched, back pointedly turned so Kankri can't see his face. Dave fights not to grin. Kankri is still ranting about pigs and would you eat a human toddler because from his point of view they're at about the same level of development and--

"I'm feeling really attacked right now," Karkat says, eyes still demurely lowered onto the pasta he's thoroughly draining (it's probably as drained as it'll get without, like, individually wiping each piece off with a hand towel.) "Can you please stop carnivore-shaming here--"

"Oh, that is quite the unfair mischaracterization! You may eat sheep as much as you please, they're dumb animals. Cow if you really must. Or pretty much any poultry or fish--"

"You keep blasphemin'," Dave quips, and hands Karkat the buttered plate, "You're gonna be eating a lotta nothing."

Kankri throws him a withering glare. "Oh, threatening to starve me now?"

Dave shrugs.

Then Karkat -- busy spreading out a layer of pasta to cheese up -- says casually, "That reminds me, I told Dave what Blood does."

Rose immediately emerges from the fridge, a predatory look on her reddened, still-puffy face. "Oh, _really_. Do tell!"

Karkat snorts, slinks her a look. Kankri is sitting back on his haunches and blinking. "Nah," Karkat says. "Kankri can tell you if he wants, but I won't."

Dave is aware that he's grinning like a total fool, and doesn't even care. Karkat just used his _name_. Not his Name-name, but his -- Dave. He's never done it before. Dave ducks his head, gets busy grating some cheese, cheeks heating up and probably dimpling and what is he, seven years old? Yeah, sounds about right.

"Dave?" Rose says, pointed, eyes narrow.

Dave ducks his head some more, swallows a chuckle. "Hmmmmm... Nah, wouldn't want to deprive you of your fun."

She stares at him for like ten seconds, and then she sidesteps out of the fridge, punches him in the shoulder, and goes back to looting their sad excuse for proper food stocks.

"You're a troll. You will rue the day you dangled that under my nose only to deny me. How about chopping up these sausages?"

" _Pork_ , Master," Kankri reminds her, just a little strangled. When Dave looks over his shoulder he catches Kankri stealing little baffled glances at Karkat's back.

"We can make a sausage salad side dish. What's in here that we can throw in with it?"

"Cheese cubes?"

"Fuck yes," Karkat throws in. "Cheese on everything. Do that."

They do that.

\--

Rose walks into the bathroom while Dave is brushing his teeth. He frowns a little at her because hey, he could have been peeing.

She closes the door behind her, cutting off the sound of bickering (they still haven't figured out where Kankri is going to sleep, but the floor is most definitely not it.)

"Did he tell you he would love you?" she asks, low and a little tired, pained, like she can already guess.

Dave's jaw twitches; he makes sure he's staring himself down in the mirror and not looking at her. "... Wow, that's pretty insulting actually. Nice. I'm feeling kinda offended for him."

Rose lets out a short, nasal sigh. "He's a demon. He would not. For most of them, tricking you would be _sensible_. Pragmatic. Even if he chose not to, it wouldn't be insulting to think he might be smart enough to pull it off."

Yeah, Dave's back molars need special attention tonight. "Pragmatic is a thing he ain't much, I guess," he says when he's done, carefully toneless.

Rose picks up his comb, turns it over in her hands for a few too-long seconds, and then starts picking at the knotted ends of her hair, edging closer so she can see herself in the mirror over the sink without getting in bumping distance of Dave. Dave shuffles to the side wordlessly; he doesn't want to be that close either right now.

"I'm not that stupid," he says, and spits in the sink. It's a thing he doesn't want to share but Rose will keep prying until he snaps and tells her to fuck off, and then she will sit on her conclusions and brood until nothing can pry them out of her ass. "And he didn't. He said he didn't get it and he tried to tell me about love between demons and I understood jack shit, it was great at getting the cultural divide point across. Or more like not across, yeah, nice bottomless chasm there. You don't need to be scared I'm being taken in, a succubus he hella fucking ain't."

She's not even wearing makeup, Dave notices, watching the drooping, pinched set of her unpainted lips. Or a headband, either; was she getting ready for bed when he sent that message?

Hey, sis, I'm handing my slave a gun and letting him point it at my face, it's Schrodinger's suicide.

"He trusts me now," Dave says, and isn't sure if that's entirely true, or if it covers ten percent of what he means, or... It's too narrow a word to convey what changed.

Objectively, nothing did. Yet.

Rose looks like she wants to object, but eventually she sighs and says, "Well, he did give you his Price, amongst other things."

Dave snorts, bends over at the waist to fill his mouth straight from the faucet, rinses. "I don't even get why he didn't sooner, it's such an easy one too."

"You don't?" Rose says, an eyebrow arched, the comb stopped mid-stroke. "Dave, demons _want_ their Prices. They enjoy them."

Well, yes, but -- oh. Then so long as Karkat felt his will was being forced...

"I was going crazy trying to figure out one thing he would damn well enjoy on this plane of existence," he complains vaguely, still trying to...

"He didn't want to enjoy serving you."

Dave's throat goes tight. All those times Karkat came to work with him. The time he helped Burnett with her investigation, of his own will. That time someone hit him in the thigh, and he was just, no, of course I don't want you to take revenge for me, you're oath-sworn to protect his ass, what the hell.

He did it because it was in his nature, even when he got nothing from it. Even when he refused to get anything from it, because...

Shit. Addict signing a binding contract, and Dave is cocaine. How do you keep anything of yourself back?

Dave really wishes they were alone at home right now. He would... he doesn't know. Hug him for an hour, maybe. Cry on him a little.

Make love to him -- he wishes, but that'd be selfish from what little Karkat gets from it that isn't pure sustenance, and Dave isn't suspended at the moment, he'll be feeding him gourmet meals no later than tomorrow.

Okay, Dave has cried enough today. He's putting a stop to it, orders from above, and by that he means his brain. He rinses his mouth a second time, combs his hair out of his face with damp fingers, straightens up.

"... I don't suppose you'll let yourself be talked into going on a blind date. Or three. Find someone to take your mind off him."

Dave twitches, slants his sister a mean look. "Rose. Who the _fuck_ would want to date me when I'm joined at the hip with a demon and am probably going to have to be available for emergency fucking at the _very_ least." He shakes his head, annoyed at her, annoyed at himself, because he knows why she has to try. There's really no future in this, but so what? "When I'm in love with someone else who's going to be right here under my nose, _while_ I'm dating them?"

"I'd look on polyamory websites," she says, but like she already knows he's just going to roll his eyes. He obliges her.

"Your kink is not my kink, and that's okay," he intones, deadpan, and gets glowered at.

Rose sighs in the end, and steps closer to the sink. Dave wordlessly gets her a new toothbrush, and steps around her to leave.

"By the way," she says, casual. "What does Blood _do_?"

Dave snorts, and closes the door neatly behind him.

Kankri is spread out face down on the couch looking smug and daring him to comment. Dave throws him a "Don't poke holes in the upholstery," and climbs the ladder.

Karkat is curled up on the mattress, all eyes at half-mast, but he slides Dave a glance and stretches a little, rounding his back; his wings flare, and then fold closed again like twin fans.

Dave crawls into bed with him, lays down face-to-face and sighs.

"We need more beds," he says, quietly enough that he thinks Kankri can't hear them. "Dun want Rose to share."

But yeah, there's no space for her on the couch, she'd be impaled the first time Kankri shifts to scratch his ass cheek.

"She sleeps on _your_ side of the bed," Karkat replies, but then he shrugs one shoulder, brow faintly furrowed. "Yeah, it's annoying. I don't want to be unconscious around her."

But it's okay around him now? Heh. Probably it's just that it's habit now to sleep around Dave, and experience says nothing bad will happen -- other than the random bed-hair picture -- but Dave is still not used to thinking that maybe the more charitable option _is_ the right one. It feels like a bright little spark under his ribs every single time he realizes it's not actually off the table. 

"I promise I won't let her draw any dicks on you," Dave says solemnly. Karkat stares back, eyes glowing a faint, steady red in the dim of the mezzanine.

"Heard and witnessed," he says, a smirk ghosting at the edges of his mouth. Dave snorts.

"Dork."

"Fop."

"Oh hey, that's a good one. Vintage. Where'd you hear it?"

Karkat rolls his eyes and kicks Dave's ankle. Dave traps his shelled murderpaw under his own bare, soft arch.

"Vocabulary download, dipstick."

"I didn't even remember I knew it until you used it."

Karkat bounces his foot, not nearly hard enough to dislodge Dave. "Yeah, so I'm not as careless as you are with my vocabulary."

"You don't misuse it and lose pieces under the couch," Dave intones, and nods wisely. "Teach me, sensei."

Karkat snorts. Then just... looks at him.

Dave doesn't even hum in answer, doesn't try to move the moment along. He's cool like this. Looking, being looked at. It's nice. It's warm.

"See," Karkat says, quiet, his voice buzzing a little at the edge of a whisper, "I'm sure you're transmitting some kind of romance signals right now, but I have no fucking clue how to read any of them."

"...Pfff."

Dave cracks a smile. He's a real smile factory today, goddamn, his cheek muscles are gonna ache tomorrow.

"Gazing into each other's eyes," he points out, just a bit embarrassed to have to point it out. "Major marker of developing intimacy, bro. It's why people stare each other down when they want to fight, it's aggressive if you're not welcome. Invasive, right? What do demons do for that? -- the intimacy one, I mean."

Karkat makes an unimpressed face. "Incorporeal, I can see their _soul_ \-- at least the outer edges -- I don't need to fake myself some understanding via ogling their eyeballs." But he still sounds quiet and thoughtful.

He lifts a hand and traces a claw in the air half an inch from Dave's forehead, between his eyes, trails it along his temple; Dave can almost feel the touch.

"I can see your magic, a bit. It's not entirely the same thing -- doesn't convey as much intent, unless you're about to wreck someone's shit."

"Oh." Dave's voice comes out rough; he clears his throat. Rose will be done in a minute. "That's cool. Wish I could do that."

"Get yourself an upper set of eyes, I guess." Karkat shrugs a wing, smirks, takes his hand back.

"That _could_ look cool, but dilemma," Dave says, throat dry and wanting so badly to burrow in his arms that it aches. "Where do I get a pair of shades for them."

"Why do you _exist_ ," Karkat concludes with well-practiced disgust.

Rose comes out of the bathroom. Dave turns on his bedside lamp; she turns off the ceiling lights. She stops by Kankri to murmur something and Dave feels uncomfortably like he's spying on something that should be private. Maybe they all four of them should have slept up here in a pile, it'd be less weird somehow, a sibling sleepover, but Kankri really does take up too much space and Rose will be hard enough to fit on Dave and Karkat's futon as it is.

She climbs the ladder and Dave makes sure his back is to her (his face to Karkat) and his eyes are closed. See? He's asleep.

He's asleep.

\--

There's a -- woman? being? -- who loves him, and he loves her, and they never could truly meet -- know each other -- not like this, and it's glorious -- it's not what he wanted, too close, it hurts, it _hurts_. He blinks; she's gone. She leaves an ember in his breast that slowly burns itself free.


	28. Chapter 28

Three AM on a Sunday, he's dressed to the nines and trying to pour his best beloved partner into a taxi. Jade's butt swings along with the muffled beat they can still hear from the club.

"It's all your faaaault!" she yells as she flops down into the backseat, shaking her fist in the air.

Dave takes her wrist and folds her arm so he can close the door. "Yeah, yeah."

"I'm never taking you clubbing again," she adds through the window -- no, wait, that's Feferi, the pout is distinctive, Jade is not half this lippy. They've been switching all night, it's a bit dizzying.

Okay, it's also kind of fun. He hasn't spent fun partner time with Jade in literal ages.

"My heart's broken," Dave says as he goes around the car and slips in. "I will cry myself to sleep, see if I don't."

He gives the driver the address and settles in as the taxi leaves the curb.

"She's not gonna upchuck on my seat, is she?" the driver asks.

"Nah, she's not half sloshed enough, it's kind of amazing."

"The body does feel pretty steady!" Feferi chirps, poking her head between the seats to grin at the poor man. "Wavery and all, but hardly any nausea. Which is good because I'd leave if there was, and she still owes me back pay."

The driver blinks slowly, slips Dave a querying look in the mirror. Dave looks carefully bland. Was there something weird here? Surely not.

He checks his phone, in case he missed some messages, and then checks... other things, all hail smartphones. Karkat's twitter activity shows a spate of reblogs and comments starting half an hour ago. Huh. Dave shoots him a message.

_whatcha doin up at this hour i thought youd be asleep by now_

He gets an answer almost straight away. _I FUCKING WISH. ARE YOU BACK AT LALONDE'S YET?_  
_YOU *ARE* GOING TO LALONDE'S, YES?_

Trusting. Not that Karkat doesn't know exactly how much it annoys Dave when he's barred from his own apartment for cause of insufficient backup. Warded up the wazoo or not, it bothers Karkat to leave him alone in it. The other solution was to be a dick and cockblock Karkat's sleepover, though, and that...

Well. Their contract is still that shitty unbalanced mess. Dave doesn't want to drag his feet and lean on it too much.

 _chill dude promised i would_  
_even tho it chafes my ass so red i could be a magical reindeer tbh_  
_were en route, fefjade failed to hook anyone for a night of carnal lust so im dragging their drunk butt along_  
_hows gamzee?_

 _SOME IDIOT INTRODUCED HIM TO POT BROWNIES. HE'S BEEN OOZING AROUND BEING EVEN MORE USELESS THAN USUAL ALL EVENING._  
_THE TV AT THIS HOUR IS ABYSMAL. I DID NOT KNOW IT WAS POSSIBLE TO REACH THESE BORED HEIGHTS WITHOUT A SPACESHIP MADE OF THE PUREST ENNUI, SLOWLY PRESSED INTO TEDIUM DIAMONDS OVER UTTERLY EMPTY EONS._

Huh. Biting his lip, Dave types, erases, and then types again, _you want me to come pick you up?_

Jade is leaning against his shoulder, eyes closed. He tries not to be the typical clingy boyfriend as he waits for the answer.

_NO, HE'S GOING TO WAKE UP FEELING SHITTY, I'D RATHER HE DOESN'T WAKE UP ALONE._

... Yeah, okay, trying or not, that stings a bit.

It isn't like Karkat and Gamzee are dating. Even if they were dating it would probably be one of those incomprehensible demon ones Dave doesn't get at all...

Even if it _was_ one he'd get, it isn't his place to feel lonely and replaced. (Doesn't help the 'feeling it anyway' thing.)

It's been weird, these last two weeks. Karkat has been looking at him more, speculative, oddly not hostile but at the same time not... not anything Dave would call flirty either. Just intrigued, a bit amused maybe. As Karkat was spooning him and jerking him off the other day Dave'd had a mental image of a farmer milking his favorite cow; he wishes it didn't feel so apt, he can't get the comparison out of his head and it's making getting it up a bit of a problem.

"Eugh, Feferi!" Jade says, and giggles, sneaking Dave a look.

"What?"

"She thinks -- no, I can say -- okay fine. I think you owe me twice over!" Feferi says. "First because no one would bite because they thought you were my buoyfriend, right? And two because when someone did bite, you said no!"

"He thought we were shopping for a _threesome_ ," Dave grumbles, and prays the taxi driver didn't hear them, but from the sudden snickering cough it's a fair bet that Buddha is not feeling merciful today.

"Well, it would have _been_ a threesome!"

Dave side-eyes Feferi. "Not that he would have _known_ it."

"Well then, I wasn't going to ask you to partifishate, but you could have sat in the corner and watched--" She giggles, Jade's face flushing a violent red, and Dave's partner crumples against his side snorking like a piggy being tickled.

"So many worlds of no. Universes of no. Plural no. Noes."

"Whale, he's gone now at any rate. And I'm still hungry, aaaand you _owe_ me--"

"I will sic Karkat on you, don't even think I won't."

He picks up the phone, types vengefully, _karkaaaat feferi is making a pass at meeeee_. He doesn't mean to hit send but the car swerves and his finger swipes. Whoops.

_WELL IT'S NOT LIKE I'M GOING TO BE ABLE TO FUCK YOU TODAY._

... Oh.

Well.

Yeah, there's... there's that.

_AT THE SAME TIME I DON'T REALLY WANT HER MIASMA ON YOU._

_your choice bro_ , he types back, as if he would fuck Feferi even if she _wasn't_ inhabiting his best, _platonic_ partner.

"I was jerking your fins!" Feferi dissolves into giggles. "I know sex between you two would be too weird and probably get you all deflated," she adds consolingly. Dave snorts, startled.

"Hey, now, Jade is plenty fine and--"

"Don't you dare tell her she's wrong," Jade says, briefly surfacing to narrow her eyes at him, before she goes back under and it's Feferi's delighted grin again.

 _OH, GOODIE, MY CHOICE. I DO LIKE CHOICES!_  
_TELL HER TO RESPECTFULLY FUCK OFF, THEN._

_will do_

Dave closes his phone.

"Lord and master says no," he relays.

"Poo."

"Sorry. Wait, not sorry."

Feferi lets out a long, soulful sigh. Dave pats the top of her head.

"I thought he was chumpier. I mean nicer."

"He was nice with your crab," Dave points out, and she shrugs like that was centuries ago. Granted, it's fairly inconsequential.

"No but even so! I mean he rants, but he's more crab than shark. Like. Soul-wards."

Dave is glad the cabbie is entertained. He scratches Jade-Feferi's skull with his nails and she makes a little pleased, breathy noise. "You know him pretty well, huh."

"Yeah."

"Interesting. Thought you'd never met him before he incarnated, do you talk to Meenah a lot after all?"

"Oh, no, that was before--"

She snaps her teeth closed.

"Before?" Dave prompts, one eyebrow up, but nothing more comes out. "Did you and Meenah used to be besties and then you had a huge row and swore to be bitter enemies forevermore, or what?"

"... Somefin like that!" she exclaims, and then she's rearing forward to peer at the taxi driver. "Hey, hey, mister Cabbie, sir, you wouldn't happen to be really nice and willing to feed a poor young demon?"

\--Jesus, he almost swerves them into the other lane. " _Um_?" At this hour the road is fairly empty, but wow. Dave grabs for her shoulder and wonders how drunk Jade is, that she's letting it happen.

"Not anything freaky," Dave says, cringing a little bit. "Just... things you would not do anyway on account of you're wearing a ring."

"Oh, yeah, of course," the cabbie replies, strangled, half-relieved and half-disappointed.

"You know, just basic... demon-feeding methods, no sacrifice or -- okay I should... shut up now. She's too drunk now at any rate, so I'm noping that shit." He elbows them in the ribs. "Hsst, Jade, _wake up_."

"I'm awake!" Jade protests. "It's just funny is all. Also I don't mind older men! But yeah, wedding ring and all that..." She lets out a jaw-cracking yawn. The cabbie is staring in the mirror like he's expecting to see fangs, and perhaps also to be suddenly molested, but like, not in an unwelcome way. Dave has never been so glad to recognize Rose's street.

He shoves Jade past the cold iron gate before he turns to pay the guy, making sure to be utterly wall-faced to discourage any attempts to get a phone number or make a lame racy joke. The cab departs; Dave follows Jade to the front door. Evening out concluded, and he survived to the end! He feels like he should get some points. Even before all the pick-up failures it was a bit tedious, in between the funny bits. Seriously, he wonders when he became the boring one of the whole group.

No, wait, he was never the cool party dude, he was pretty much faking it from the start. Remixing stuff for public consumption from the comfort and safety of his home would be cool, he's not saying his teenage self was _entirely_ misguided about his dreams of stardom, but actually having to perform them? _Super_ urgh. Listening and dancing in public without anywhere to retreat to from time to time is barely less urgh.

Before he walks inside the Lalondes' house he looks at his phone a last time, to make sure he's not leaving anyone hanging, and there's a last message from Karkat: _WITH YOUR PAIR BONDING THING YOU WOULDN'T ENJOY THAT, RIGHT?_ He doesn't know how to take it.

Better not think about it at all. He closes the phone without answering, walks in after Jade, and tries to keep her quiet as he navigates her to the couch.

\--

Monday morning, weekend over and everybody back to their rightful homes. Dave barely had time to enjoy it. (It had nothing to do with feeling kind of rootless stuck alone and without his tunes or his demon at his sisters' home, either.)

" _Dave! Get your ass_ _over_ _here!_ "

The holler isn't exactly necessary -- Dave's in the bathroom, not in the next building over. Still, he pulls his pants back up and goes to wash his hands immediately, yelling right back over the sound of water and pretending he's not still going _eee!_ over Karkat using his actual name. "Yeah, coming!"

Not that Karkat never calls him fuckface or "the asshole over there" anymore, but.

When he comes out, the front door is open and a pimply kid in a UPS uniform is on their doorstep, electronic doodad in hand and looking at Karkat all nonplussed.

"Neither of us knows if his bosses would count me as a pet or as underage," Karkat complains, sitting up on his haunches to glower powerlessly up at the guy. "Sign it for me, okay?"

Blinking slowly, Dave gets to the door. At least the guy must not wish them any harm or he'd have gotten nauseous stepping onto their floor, probably.

"So that's the thing you used my credit card for," he comments as he takes the doodad and signs, eyeballing the package to try to figure out what's in it. It's generic as all hells and he can't guess jack shit. Hm.

"I like how you assume I only used it for one thing," Karkat says casually, and accepts the package from UPS guy, who gives them a bland "have a good day" and shuffles off to the elevator like all this surprise sentient demon shenaniganry only matters inasmuch as he's now late on his delivery route. Dave closes the door, puts the lock back on, and since Karkat is already absconding to the mezzanine with his treasure, goes back to the bathroom to shave the little he's got of mustache.

It's not like he's gonna be in contact with the public today either, but any non-Demon Crimes superior he meets will be riding his ass about the stealthiest sideways fart, so. May as well be pretty.

"What did you buy?" he calls out as he gets dressed in the bathroom.

... The waistcoat is perhaps overdoing it a little, and he's pretty sure he's going to roast at work, but fuck it, he hasn't really flaunted his impeccable sense of style in much too long. Okay, no, he had a waistcoat on Saturday night, but really all it did was make him miss it; the dancing crowds didn't seem to appreciate it properly.

"I bought an item of torturous mystery," Karkat says back, but idly. "You're forbidden from looking in the box, by the way."

"Aw. Okay, fine. You ready to go?"

Karkat hops off the mezzanine, lands with a bounce; he's wearing his shell, his police shield armband, and his reinforced fanny pack that contains things like his smartphone and keys to the house and emergency hard candy. The keys are wrapped up in a handkerchief so they won't crack the phone. Dave just waits for the day he'll try to stuff a first aid kit in there.

Super chic. Dave tries to imagine Karkat in anything that might be called fashionable and his eyes cross a little.

"Thought we were going, slothbrain."

"Yeah, yeah, hold your horses." He unlocks the door again, and they go.

Downstairs, officers Sengupta and Morozov are waiting in their car to escort Dave and Karkat to work, which is not a thing the good Captain has eased up on yet. Karkat waves casually as he climbs into the backseat of Dave's car.

At least they're also Demon Crimes, so Dave knows for sure they wouldn't yawn and drive extra-mindful of traffic laws if the Felt decided to go for him and Karkat in transit.

"This rap music is the least musical type I've heard yet," Karkat muses, chin propped up on Dave's seat. "You've got lots of faster-slower rhythm plays, true, but a bare handful of ups and downs and then monotone for a whole verse." When Dave glances in the mirror he's got his ass on the very edge of the backseat, like he's ready to slink back into the footwell in a hot second.

"You philistine, you just can't read the subtleties. And it's also the wordiest, snarkiest musical type, so hey, you could also shut your face hole."

"Pff. Didn't say I disliked it, but it'd make more sense to either marry the genres better or divorce them entirely."

"Yeah, you're describing epic poetry, which is a genre that went out with the Romans -- whoa, shit."

Traffic -- pretty sparse in this area so close to the borderlands -- just stopped cold; Dave almost rear-ended someone. His arm going up without thought to keep Karkat from diving between the seats, he braces for a butt-bump from Sengupta, but she manages to brake in time, too.

"Goddamn, some people--"

Karkat's hand closes on his shoulder.

At the end of the street there's a bus -- line twenty-two, the only recourse of high schoolers living on the dangerous edge of town; school buses don't come out this far.

It's starting and braking and starting again, trying to swerve right and left like a...

... horse that's trying to shake something off its back...

... what the fuck is that.

"Siren," Dave says as he extracts himself from his lane and floors it. Some lady coming from the other direction stands on her brakes, yelling, to let them through.

Sengupta and Morozov are right on their heels. Good. Karkat worms his way to the front seat, fishes Dave's cell phone out; Dave listens to him call Dispatch.

"--Demon is in or on city bus twenty-two--" (Bus suddenly swerves down an unplanned street. Dave follows.) "Going up -- what street is -- Carlisle and--"

Dave stands on the brakes.

Jesus. The bus just hit a fire hydrant. At least they won't have to chase it all the way across town? Dave and Karkat are bursting out of their car and running in the next second. They can hear people screaming.

Low-level demons don't come into town; crowds scare them. "Felt trap?" Dave hazards.

"It's got civilians either way," Karkat growls back, and keeps galloping at the problem like a tiny, angry tank.

Dave loves him so ridiculously much. He cracks a tiny, tiny grin, and as they go around the back of the bus, he says, "Karkat?"

He calls up Karkat's Name, the whole of it that he can hold in his mind, all the blood-like lava of it, the crumbling obsidian towers, the immense heart beating under the ruins. All the rage and guilt and will-to-prove-himself. Karkat stumbles, all eyes gone wide.

"Hey, buddy. This is for you."

Dave has no gun on him, but that's okay, he's never truly disarmed. He tugs on Aradia, who swirls up and shimmers his body into gears and painted metal skin -- a challenge -- and he calls out; "Demon Patrol -- everybody _clear the area!_ "

He's pretty sure the people escaping through the bus doors, pouring onto the pavement screaming, aren't really hearing him at all.

It's not what matters. This? This is right, this is his job, and it's Karkat's Price.

Karkat, whose eyes have started to glow red.

"Something of Breath," Sengupta says as she catches up at a jog, as the four of them press their shoulders against the back of the bus. She has her gun out and up, and so does her partner.

"Backup coming, ETA two minutes," Morozov says, but then someone screams and it's a different sound -- not just terror, but also pain.

Dave flicks his fingers at them, directs them to go around the bus on the outside; he follows Karkat on the sidewalk, between the bus and the building, aiming for the doors. In the flickers Dave catches through the windows the demon is a see-through coil of fluttery tendrils, an amorphous, shifting mass.

It's hovering over a preteen girl, fallen on her side, entangled in her backpack, and there are smoky, blurry-edged tendrils drifting up her body toward her head. Her dark skin comes up in violent rashes at every touch.

Aradia seizes the tentacles -- just one second, to let Karkat aim.

The thing screeches, echoing and weirdly faraway; it floats away like a torn banner in a storm and then Karkat is standing over the kid, Dave is moving behind him to grab the wriggling girl by the wrists -- she's trying to batter Karkat with her little fists and knees in the chest plate, her spine is definitely not broken. Dave crumbles her bag's shoulder straps to dust with Damara, pulls her down the corridor right between Karkat's feet, and then Sengupta is there at the door to help her down, help her up, lead her away. Behind them the driver is also gone with Morozov. The bus is empty.

"Okay," Dave says, moving into a crouch, and freezes a molecule-thin slice of air in front of every open window he sees. "Fuck it up."

Karkat starts laughing, bristled all over spines and his wings flared. Dave cannot see his face but he can guess at it. Feral. Happy.

It's hard to hit -- wispy, floating -- but it's contained, unable to pierce through metal and _really_ hating the time-locked air Dave is holding onto, and then Karkat creates a cage of thorns that encompasses the whole back of the bus and -- snickt.

"Did you just make an iron maiden out of blood, buddy," Dave mutters as he cranes his neck over Karkat to see the remnants of the thing twitching on the floor. "That's so ridiculously metal it's almost turning back into emo tryhard, careful there--"

Karkat crackles with red power, once, twice, and turns to grin at him. His eyes are glowing like embers, all his white teeth on display in that gray face; Dave forgets his words for a second.

"... It's... dead, right?"

"It was fucking delicious." He actually flaps his wings, oh lord, too cute. "Thief of Breath! God do I hate Thieves."

Dave anchors himself to the seats on both sides of the aisle to crouch at his level. The dead demon behind them has deflated to a couple handfuls of plastic bag-looking ribbons. "How do you feel?"

Karkat laughs again, eyes crinkling, stretches his arms over his head. "Fucking _amazing_. Oh god. And apart from the girl no one got hurt, and her life force is intact, and the bus didn't wreck--"

Dave pats his shoulder and pulls himself back up, knees creaking a little. His heart is still going fast, though it is slowing down. It's over. They did good. After riding a desk for the last two weeks it feels amazing.

Technically they weren't supposed to be _off_ the desk jobs today either, but when something like this happens under your nose, it's not even a question. Officers Sengupta and Morozov might have managed to handle it alone -- Sengupta is a high Level Three summoner, and the demon was barely a two, maybe even lower than that -- but they'd have had to abandon Dave and Karkat.

Possibly people will bitch that Dave and Karkat did it anyway, but Dave hardly cares.

"Okay, let's go out and wait for backup," he says.

Karkat nods, very seriously. "Proper backup is very important."

They snort at the same time.

When Dave offers his fist for a bump, Karkat rolls his eyes, but raises his gauntleted hand and bumps his shelled knuckles into Dave's.

\--

Two hours later it happens again.

Dave is at his desk and typing up his report about the most satisfying commute ever when the boss-man shoots out of his lair, calls up two detective teams, sends them off. A pair of Level Twos wandered into a habitation building.

Karkat gives them a wistful look, and then goes right back to matching papers from five cases that spilled out of Jade's folders that the jerk has no time to sort out herself, while jeering at her over the partition. (Karkat is being paid in sugar and banter and seems pretty content with it. It's funny that he used to be scared of her.)

A half-hour later John and Rose are sent out to check out a demon at a car wash.

When noon comes around there have been six incidents, two of them double incursions. No deaths, but three people are in the hospital and Karkat has gone from swishing his little tail on Dave's carpet to mantling and flaring his wings in tense flickers as they watch all the other teams go out in turn, as they end up almost alone in the labyrinth of empty cubicles.

Dave tries to keep his head down and field paperwork.

"... Thank you again for the heads up, by the way, Rose!"

Dave looks up. John is looking back over his own shoulder as he walks into the precinct.

"Hey, he wasn't wearing that before," Jade says as she peers over the partition. Dave rises from his chair, and -- huh, she's right, too. Those are _jeans_. Captain Egbert's scion in _jeans_ at _work_? Gasp.

"It was my pleasure," Rose is telling John, not quite smirking.

"Really timely, too! Watch out, that guy's a slimer -- _just_ on time! Jade, you wouldn't believe how useful my partner is, seriously, best Seer ever!"

"The demon exploded all over him, didn't it," Karkat says to Dave and Jade, peering out through the door gap. He sounds amused.

Pfff. "Fair bet."

Rolling his eyes, Kankri pads away from his mistress and her teammate. "I do wish Detective Egbert had assumed we understood the breadth of his displeasure in the first ten minutes of grousing," he says, in a display of perfect hypocrisy. Karkat snorts explosively.

"Like you've never groused for more than ten minutes, you snot-nosed windbag."

"Under-appreciative of my staying power as you might be, you will admit that at least I don't spend that time repeating the same limited arguments in the same limited vocabulary."

"Yeah, I'll give you that one. Mostly for the vocabulary part, though."

They sit on the carpet face to face, Karkat inside the cubicle and Kankri just outside, and they turn to watch Rose being berated by John like it's a show. Jade props her elbow on the partition to heckle; Dave watches everyone and snickers. Well, inwardly.

He's waiting for them to drift this way and chat -- Kankri is here, Rose will gravitate to him unless she has something pretty urgent to do -- but instead the boss walks into the room, a frown under his hat.

"Detectives," he calls out to the entire (nearly empty) room, "to the meeting room. Time for a strategy session."

John straightens up. "Aye-aye, sir!" he snaps; Rose's eyes narrow in interest and they both turn away. Kankri drags himself back up with a little sigh and goes to follow. Jade sneaks Dave a little regretful look and starts moving out of her cubicle; well, sure, _she's_ not grounded, she could be loaned out any second...

Bleh. Back to work for Dave, then.

"You too, Detective Strider, Karkat."

"--What, really?" Karkat says. Dave keeps his mouth carefully closed, and stands, trying not to look too eager to get the hell away from this papery hell.

\--

The meeting goes as Dave had expected, only a bit worse. In six hours there have been nineteen incursions; not enough data yet to figure out if things are worsening or speeding up or what, and no one has an idea yet as to the cause, except that the ether is severely perturbed. A couple of Class Threes have showed up, too.

Also they may be getting permission to use animal sacrifices on a case-by-case basis, if some spells could do with a boost.

 _Ayy, hombre!_ Aradia says like two seconds after the bossman announces it, popping into his mind space like a goddamn jack-in-the-box. Dave is so glad for the poker face training. _So_ glad.

_Come on, babe, you're hella badass already and I'd feel super bad slashing a cute little goat's throat._

_How about an asshole old goat's?_

_Shit, girl, even worse, asshole old goats are my homies._

_Haha,_ _**that's**_ _right._

He tries to listen -- organizing patrols, evacuating a few buildings too close to the zone, checking the no man's land for hobos -- he supposes they're used to dealing with stray demons but if the numbers and/or power levels go up...

 _No one miss old goat man with smell of piss and brew,_ Damara says, from what feels like the other side of his head. Dave groans under his breath. _Give me a hobo, I ruin demon shit all day._

Oh hell, he can _feel_ Aradia's attention sharpening, her casually friendly presence become...

 _Hey, how about he sacrifice_ _**you**_ _to me_ _?_ she throws, all smiles. _Whatcha say, Dave-man? She's untrustworthy and also boring._

_Um. Okay, first of all I don't know how to kill an incorporeal demon--_

_Yappy bitch cannot fight her own battles,_ Damara says darkly, and Dave winces.

_Nah, I just don't think you're worth the trouble! Or anything at all, actually._

Goddamn. Why does this always happen. He throws a thought toward Latula's Name, her wind on razor scales, freedom and free fall.

_Latufreakingla reportin' for duty! --Oh jeeze._

Dave sighs under his breath. _Yeah, can you tell 'em we're closed for business, please--_

 _Oh, come on, like you couldn't tell me yourself!_ Aradia says. Damara sneers.

 _Lizard bitch and_ _**that one**_ _will not tell me what I --_

Jesus. He could disinvite them all, but what a headache. And if he dissolves the contracts now, who's to say they'll ever come back? Or that they'll offer the same terms? Outside of his head they're talking patrol routes and he hasn't heard his name yet, which is lucky but goddamn.

In all that snark and snarling he barely notices Karkat peering at him from the corner of his little eyes.

He sure notices when a clawed hand lands low on his back -- and then when it tugs his shirt out and slips up against his skin. Whoa, um, that's forward. What the h--

Ow. Prickle.

"Latula," Karkat says quietly. "Power boost?"

He tugs on her name and tugs on Dave in the middle and Latula perks right up.

Dave isn't sure she even has time to do anything, Aradia goes _Oh, whatever! Talk to you later, Dave_ , and disappears, and Damara isn't far behind, growling all the while. Latula ripples amused disappointment at Dave, and fades out.

Karkat's hand is still on the small of his back. That's starting to get kind of embarrassing for a work conference--

"Strider, Vantas..."

\--Shit. Dave absolutely can't read the glance the good Captain sends them. Welp.

"Stay behind afterwards."

Double welp. Dave nods as coolly as possible and wriggles his hips a bit to get Karkat to take his hand off already, which he does with a total lack of either guilt or stealth.

Jade, John, and Rose linger as everyone files out. The boss doesn't tell them to clear out -- is he planning to ream Dave for being felt up by his demon in public in front of them or...?

"So what's up?" Karkat asks, propping an elbow on the table carelessly. "Also why were we even here, there was nothing for us. Not that I mind the change of locale, because cubicles are where imagination and freedom go to die, but I'm still wondering."

"My request that you be put back on the front lines is still being studied," Egbert Senior replies dryly, "but between us--"

"Yesss!" Jade goes, both fists pumped. Egbert side-eyes her and then chuckles.

"-- _Oh_." Everyone looks at Dave. He clears his throat. Yeah, so not telling them he was still thinking about the casual fondling-and-blooding. "Oh yeah. I mean. I figured it'd be something like that."

Shit, what did he miss from the meeting? There better not have been anything too important. Teach him to get distracted by Demon Theater Hour.

"Yes, well." Egbert shrugs casually. "Nothing sure yet, but I really don't foresee the good Chief keeping a Class Four detective pushing paper for a small-time discipline issue when we've had to cancel vacation time for a half-dozen lower-level summoners already."

Yeah, it's kind of stupid to bench a strong summoner and demon pair when this shit is going down. Especially when Jade is also losing efficiency by playing not-very-necessary third wheel to other teams. Briefly he thinks about asking if they're going to revoke Dirk's suspension too...

... Considering what Dirk did to deserve it, probably not until civilians start dying. Argh.

Dave makes a very small note in the back of his brain to ask Rose, later, if anyone is keeping Dirk informed. They probably shouldn't, but.

"By three PM if you still haven't officially had your punishment postponed I will take it upon myself to go and ... grease the wheels, so to speak."

"Does that mean 'yell at people'?" Karkat asks, eyebrows up, a faint smirk on his face. "I could help, sir, I'm good at explaining stupidity to stupid people."

John snorts. "You're good at yelling 'why are you stupid' in a lot of wordy ways, you mean."

"Oh, shut your nonsense hose, Teeth McGee, we're not in need of your expert dumbing-down services."

"Hehe, see?"

"Yeah, that was a pretty good example!" Jade concurs, nodding, lips pinched.

Karkat narrows his lower eyes meanly. He doesn't mean it even one bit.

"Friendship is a beautiful thing," Rose says, syrupy. They all turn to glower at her. Dave tries not to snort.

"I'm glad to hear that!" Captain Egbert says, cracking a faint smile. "Because as you might have gathered if I manage to get them free in time I will be assigning Harley and Strider to the two of you as backup."

"Backup for what?" Dave asks without thinking. Karkat arches the fuck out of his right eyebrow.

"They just got done talking about the science people who wanted a closer look at that mess, sloth-brain."

"--Oh. Right."

"The _researchers_ , Dave. From the university. With the big books and things?"

Dave glares at Jade a tiny little bit. He feels ganged up on. "Sorry, I had a brain fart, okay?"

Rose is smirking; John's lips are pursed. "Dude, we drew escort, remember? We're not gonna send anyone into the danger zone with only two people, especially officials."

"Okay, I know I'm slow today but I don't need it explained three times either, guys." Dave totally remembers and was in no way distracted by his harem from hell. "What about Sengupta and Morozov? Are they supposed to come with?"

"I'm sure I'll have no trouble reassigning them for the duration," Egbert the Elder says with dry amusement. "If that's all?"

"Actually," Kankri says, one finger pointed up like a smug douche in horn-rimmed glasses. John and Rose both blink at him, like this wasn't planned. Huh, Dave wonders, is Kankri taking interest in the job too? That'd make it two Vantases who can't help being helpful and interested out of contract. Hee.

"Yes?"

"My apologies for risking triggering you, as I can perceive that this association is unpleasant to you, but alas it is both too, let's say, murky and muffled for its nature to become clear to me without something that might be construed as prodding, and too closely related to my summoner to let it go without investigating." He pauses, sitting straight up on his haunches, his chin lifted like he dearly wants to look at them all from the same height, or possibly higher. "Why are you associating Detectives Lalonde and Strider personally with current events at all?"

Egbert stares down, polite smile and relaxed eyes gone from his face.

"At least I assume it must be current events, as the feeling arose most strongly during discussions of such and it would make very little sense otherwise."

Silence. Kankri starts to frown.

"... Was I mistaken?"

"Um. Do you think the Felt did it?" John asks, rubbing the back of his neck. "Only I don't know how they'd mess with the ether so much, I mean."

Jade nods, brows knit. "Yeah, to me it sounds more like a flash-flood on the other side, some kind of low-scale natural disaster maybe? I don't know how a human or even ten humans could affect the ether like that. And the demons in town, it feels like they're running scared, they're not being controlled or anything. Then again I guess it could be another mass breakout like Gamzee..."

Egbert the Elder sighs, shakes his head, his wide shoulders slumping slightly. "No, that's not... Not the Felt."

He rakes a hand through his thinning hair, eyes on the carpet. Dave frowns. He looks... sad?

"From the preliminary data there's no real link to what happened twenty-three years ago -- back then there was no sudden invasion -- but at the same time, the last time the ether was so badly stirred we went from a middling, stable hell gate to one in constant expansion..."

"Yes?" Rose prompts quietly -- not gently, though it sounds like it, and when Dave looks at her, her eyeballs are red in full.

"The last time the gate acted up, we lost your -- we lost two good officers and friends."

There's a moment of silence. Dave stands there, awkward, with no idea what to say to that.

"Oh," Kankri says, like he's a little disappointed, a little embarrassed that it wasn't something a bit more nefarious.

"Oh, that's right," John says, and leans into his dad to bump their shoulders, eyebrows knit in sympathy. "That's pretty sad."

Dave sticks his hands in his pockets, makes a little grunt of agreement, doesn't look at Jade when she bumps her shoulder into his. Hey, look a carpeted floor, how interesting. Nice diamond pattern there, very... regular.

What is he supposed to feel about his unknown parents' death anyway? It's not like he knew them personally. Not like Captain Egbert.

He probably wasn't even a captain at the time. Incredible.

"But that's probably not why you reacted, Kankri," Egbert says suddenly, like he wasn't sure if he should say it, still isn't sure, but is going to say it anyway.

He firms his voice, settles his weight, braced, steady.

"There's no real proof that they stopped it -- they didn't talk to anyone before they went, and no one knows exactly what happened. But I... I always believed that they ended it somehow. Slowed it down, at least. We were able to evacuate nearly everyone. They never came back." He looks up, spears Rose and then Dave, eyes narrow with an odd tension. "I watched the two of you grow up alongside my son and my nephew and nieces, and I really don't wish to see history repeat itself."

Dave blinks, taken aback. "It's not like we even know what they did and whether it would work now--"

"Dave!" Jade exclaims, and makes big 'what the hell' eyes at him.

"It's the fact that the first thing you jump to is 'we don't know how' and not 'we would never' that worries me," Egbert says, a little rough, a little pained.

Rose opens her mouth, and then closes it, looks chagrined. "To think I just yelled at Dave about this very thing barely two weeks ago. I suppose we come by this tendency honestly."

"Hah. I suppose you do," Egbert says, and cracks a tiny, lopsided smile, and then he straightens up. "Alright... my apologies for cutting this short, but we all have jobs to do today, Detectives."

"If they've got more questions about their progenitors, they can ask them later, right? I mean, off the job."

Dave and Rose throw Karkat the exact same look. What? Asking someone to make time for a personal chat about potentially important, awkward things? When they could be ignoring the fuck out of it and pretending they don't care, or trying to trick the answers out instead? Jesus, it's like he doesn't know them or something. Dave nudges Karkat's hip with a foot, and Karkat looks up, one eyebrow arched in confusion like he doesn't get the massive etiquette breach he just committed.

No but seriously, it's... It's not like Egbert has never mentioned their parents around them, but John and Jade's dad-slash-uncle or not, he's still... they've never been personally close? Not the way they're close to each other in the Harleybert family. It's just... It's. Well.

Awkward.

It's never been something Dave felt he could ask a ton about, is all.

Maybe it was the locked-up, angry-to-hide-grieving faces Bro made every time Dave brought it up as a kid that trained him out of wondering.

"Ah," Egbert says, visibly just as startled by this novel approach. "I... Yes, that would be acceptable. And now I really must go," he adds with a little nod, and gathers his files and walks out. Dave rubs the back of his neck and hopes John comes up with something silly that misses the undercurrents by three miles so they can put things back under wraps.

"... That was kind of weird!" John says instead, because of course he gets insightful when you least want him to.

"Was it?" Rose inquires with complete insincerity. John elbows her.

"You know it was!"

"I don't think so?" Jade says, worrying at her thumbnail with her teeth in thought. "I think he just misses them."

"Yeah, maybe." John shrugs. "But anyway, it's maybe time to do some actual policing around here." Oh thank god, a topic change.

"I'm driving," Rose says immediately.

"What? Hey, no, it's my turn. Kankri, tell her it's my turn."

"I cannot speak deliberate falsehoods to my Master, you are aware?" Kankri says piously. John splutters, and then narrows his eyes.

"That wasn't a 'it's totally Rose's turn'! It was a non-sequething."

Kankri gives him a thin smirk as he gets up on all fours and stretches his ridiculous sails over the conference table and across the room. "Non-sequitur, and well-spotted, John. For once."

John slaps Dave in the shoulder as a friendly goodbye as he follows Kankri out, still bickering. Rose shrugs. "Well, have fun with your paperwork, Dave, Jade. Hopefully you'll be free from this hell before we've cleaned the whole gate of demons without you."

Dave makes a yappy hand at her, and she leaves too, smirking.

"Okay. Guess it's back to work, then!" Jade says, and slumps a little bit, the way Dave feels like slumping inside his soul. He kind of wants to tell her that she can take a call with another team if she wants to, but then she might not be right here when they give Dave permission to get back to field work... Anyway, he already knows she would say no, staunchly faithful.

Karkat stretches his wings too, without thinking -- Dave is sure he's not trying to copy Kankri, or puff himself up. He manages to make them look about a half-inch longer, for a brief optical illusion moment. Dave smiles down at him.

"Oh, work, awesome. I still have all those papers to sort through. Hey, Harley, do I get a jawbreaker if I correct your fucking typos and abysmal punctuation? I swear to God if I see another full paragraph without a single lost comma somewhere in the middle I will go mad, piss all over your folders, and make everyone wear them as jaunty hats."

"That's gross! And one jawbreaker per ten pages, and if you piss on anything I'll put your nose in it. Don't even try it, I've had dogs all my life, I have _training_."

"Sexy," Dave opines as he ambles back to the cubicles after them.

It only takes their miracle man of a boss another hour to spring them.

\--

"By the way, I hear you're seeing the shrink now? How badly did he faint when he saw you come in?"

Dave ducks under Jade's suddenly swinging line of fire and lets her snipe the bee-slug demon he was angling for, disgruntled. "Do we have to do this now?"

She laughs, uses Porrim's power to throw a pebble in the air and have it come down huge and heavy on top of a knot of more slug-bees. Slubees. "You got anything better to do?"

Yeah, okay, they're not exactly hard to get rid of. This is pest control. Even Karkat is going at it with a pole he found instead of either his claws or his powers, whacking away with grim, but bored, determination.

"Didn't faint, but he did go on his knees and pray to the Almighty, which is coincidentally--"

"--What you call your penis," Jade and Karkat chorus -- accidentally, and both sounding bored.

" _Hey_." Dave slips them both a disapproving look in between two hits of Damara. "Just because you guys have heard it before doesn't mean it's not still true."

The sheer scorn he feels from the both of them is unreal and also very hurtful. Dave is not the type of guy to pout, but he's totally pouting inside. Okay, he's too busy stomping a slubee that managed to sneak up to him out of existence. Eugh, his nice dress pants. Teach him to come to work in classy duds. He hopes the slime comes off.

"So if you're all sorted out and with, you know, adult supervision now--"

"Oi, oi--"

"Can I ask what the hell it was about, that thing with John having to fly Rose to you?"

... Oh. Wow. Mood falling fast. Dave turns away to look over the street, scanning the abandoned car for the rest of the infestation. "... What'd he tell you?"

"Everything he knew!" A brief pause. "He didn't know much."

Dave snorts despite himself, briefly amused. Karkat snorts too, but more out of irritation.

"Do you guys _have_ to know everything about everyone you ever talked to?"

"Yep!" Jade replies, shameless. "So what happened? It didn't sound good, but Rose wouldn't talk and Kankri made the judge-face at me--"

"Shit, you asked _Kankri_?" Dave says.

"Well, who else! I wasn't going to ask you--"

"We freaked each other out due to cultural miscommunication," Karkat drones, and briefly crackles a cage of red spines to open himself some floor space. "Then we sorted it out, and now all is sunshine and butterflies. I still don't know why sunshine is in any way considered positive instead of eye-burning and annoying," he mutters, "and the butterflies are even more useless, but there you are."

He crackles a last time to get rid of the guards around the nest, Dave crumples the abandoned truck to rust, and once she has a visual, Jade uses the rust flecks to compress the leftover slubees and the slubee queen who was shitting them out into a nice little gory cube. Infestation destroyed. Their third just this evening alone. Dave and Jade high-five, and then she turns and goes into a crouch to offer her hand to Karkat, who snorts but goes up on his haunches to cautiously tap her palm.

Dave sighs, re-holsters the gun he did not use, and stuffs his hands in his pockets. "It's what Rose was saying earlier -- I kinda accidentally said stuff that sounded hella like I have some passive, you know, suicidal urges. Which," he forced out, "turns out to maybe be an actual thing, not just another thing that _looks_ like a thing. Which I don't want to be a thing, and I didn't notice it _was_ a thing. Or at least not a huge one. Um. You feel me?"

Jade turns to look at him, expression sober -- a little sad, but when he meets his eyes he finds no judgment there, just a tiny quirk of a sympathetic smile. "I kind of maybe had a feeling that the thing was indeed a thing. I'm, um. I'm glad it's being... you know. Shrinkified."

"They met twice so far," Karkat says, stretching his arms over his head until his shell -- or maybe his spine -- pops. Urgh, gross. "And the first time was just to say hi. Anyway I haven't seen a difference yet. When are you seeing your Witch of Mind again? Someone should tell him to hurry up."

"He's a shrink, not a demon or even a summoner," Dave says with a groan.

"... Well no fucking wonder it's taking so long, then."

Jade giggles into her hand.

They start walking again; there's been another demon sighting a few blocks to the east. Dave follows his partner (best friend) and his demon (not boyfriend) and thinks how glad he is that Karkat didn't mention mating urges or a courting process.

Not that he _is_ courting Karkat.

... Not that he's _not_ courting Karkat.

He has no idea how to flirt with a normal human, never mind an extraplanar being, all the people he's dated before came on to him first; he has no idea or where to go from here, regarding the two of them -- if Karkat wants to go anywhere at all. Mixed signals are Vantas the Stouter's dominion.

It's not like this weird thing will have anywhere to go once the Felt are dealt with and Karkat is back in the incorporeal plane.

"Dave?"

Dave blinks down at Karkat, looks for Jade; she's striding ahead, a hand on the butt of her gun. Hm. Okay.

"Was just wondering if you'd like to ride, some day when you're properly disembodied again." Could be cool-ish. Kind of a long-distance relationship with zero hope of meeting again in meat space, only the skype window is his brain.

Karkat gives a slow blink, and a quiet snort. "Let's see whether I'll even want to acknowledge your existence ever again before we plan on getting me inside your gross unshelled body," he says casually.

Ouch. Hah. ... Ouch.

"... Still waiting for the sex joke," Karkat says a few seconds later, and cranes his neck to arch an eyebrow at him.

Yeah, Dave super wants to joke about bottoming for Karkat. Urgh. Being in love sucks, everything hits way too seriously, it's making him so unfun.

"That's too easy," he says.

"'Like your mom' is the proper answer, right?"

... Yeah no okay that one's funny. Lame, but that's what makes it funny. Dave cracks a tiny smile to match Karkat's floating half-smirk, and Karkat's smile widens.

"Too bad I'm not Light, I'd climb two levels just from figuring out your weird mammalian kinship jokes," he says, and actually chuckles.

"Too much power corrupts," Dave intones wisely as they go, for lack of anything better to say.

\--

"It was a good day, huh," Dave says when they get home, at half past midnight. They stopped to eat at a Chinese buffet on the way back and he's full and bone-deep tired, ready to roll into bed and sleep.

Karkat is still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and not even his full stomach will make him stop prancing. Heh. From time to time when he gets too excited -- like with the breaded shrimp, oh lawdy -- a red tendril, thin like a single hair, rolls like slow-motion electricity along his side or up his wings.

"Wasn't bad!" Karkat said, but even though Dave's back is to him, he can hear a smile in Karkat's voice and knows it for the _oh my god yes_ it is.

Gun in the gun safe, he hangs his crumpled but cleanish jacket by the door, bats some dust off it, then turns to go to the bathroom, already unbuttoning. His pants are a loss, splattered with slubee juice. Maybe if he goes to a professional cleaner...

As he pushes open the door to the laundry closet he's composing his outfit for tomorrow -- can't substitute another pair of slacks if he's using the same jacket, so it's gonna have to be jeans. Not not the slim ones if they're going to escort scientists into the no man's land, though--

"Hey," Karkat says right in his ear, plastron pressed against Dave's back. Dave almost takes a header into the laundry basket.

"Huh," Dave says, voice a little wobbly from surprise. "Hungry?"

Karkat snorts, but it sounds indulgent, amused, like he's keeping a laugh behind his teeth. "I could eat."

He nibbles on Dave's neck. Hffgh.

Dave stares at the wall. It's a very nice wall, no okay it sucks and probably needs repainted but. Karkat is standing behind him, which means he's leaning hard, or he would fall back down. Wouldn't take much to bend Dave over, heavy as he is, which Dave is failing not to think about. "How can you be hungry, you've had your Price all day long...?"

"I just said I could eat, I didn't say I was hungry, because as a stupendous, rare coincidence, I'm actually not." He nips Dave's neck. Awghghghg.

"... I thought you'd. You'd prefer your own Price?"

"Oh my little Level Seven," Karkat mutters, and falls back onto all fours.

He yanks Dave's undone slacks down on the way.

Okay, now Dave is standing in socks and button-up shirt with his pants around his ankles. Suave as _balls_.

"It's not _solid_ food," Karkat explains as he sets his claws into the leg of Dave's boxers and pulls them down past his ass. "I can't blow up my flesh food pouch if I overeat."

"Oh. Cool." Wow um. He should maybe get with the program then.

...So tired though.

But Karkat is so cheerful tonight. It'd be... it'd be nice to see more of that.

He steps out of his pants obediently, starts unbuttoning his shirt. "So what _would_ happen? Can you even overeat as a demon?"

Claw tips tickle the small of his back, Karkat's hand gone up the back of his shirt just like earlier in the meeting room only without the blood, and his spine arches.

"Aha. Knew it."

Dave glowers down, and shrugs out of the shirt and lets it fall onto Karkat's head. So there. "You smug little jerkface."

Karkat pulls the shirt up to glower at him, throws it into the laundry basket -- then hugs Dave around the thighs and lifts him off the ground. Dave lets out a totally manly yelp.

"Hey what the fuck no no no _don't drop me_ \--"

It's -- this deserves the ten-dollar word -- discombobulating as hell to suddenly be sitting in the laundry, but at the same time the way Karkat controlled his fall was -- strong. Hot.

"Okay, I draw the line at fucking in smelly socks and crusty underwear," Dave says as he tries to haul himself out, face heating up a little already. "You've already ruined the washing machine for me, there is a _line_ , Karkat, the line is right here--"

Oh hey demon hovering over him, both clawed hands braced on the edges of the basket. Karkat is smirking down at him. If Dave were still wearing underwear it would catch on fire.

Dave plants a foot in Karkat's thigh and pushes him back, wriggle-rolls out of the basket, which almost flips over. A startled laugh escapes Karkat; he doesn't think to grab Dave before Dave is out of the closet door. Dave dodges out of the bathroom, hopping onto one foot really fast to take off his socks one by one, because what if Karkat chases him, not that he has ever chased Dave but -- oh shit there he is.

There really isn't much to hide behind in the apartment. Dave speed-walks a circle around the main room, Karkat following at a careless amble, snickering and shaking his head even as he lazily goes about trying to cut Dave's escape routes.

"No. No. Help," Dave drones as he dodges behind the coffee table; his pulse is beating in his ears. "I'm being chased by a devilish fiend. Gasp, my tender virgin body."

"Well, your meat isn't at risk, I bet it's chewy like an old shoe -- hah!"

Whoops! Demon on top of the table. "That's cheating," Dave protests. "That is so cheating. Disqualified, bzzt."

"It's not cheating," Karkat counters, mock-offended, but his eyes still relaxed, his mouth still smirking a little; "it's thinking in three dimensions."

He doesn't even seem to think much about the fact that Dave is running around his apartment while completely naked, whether to laugh at it or look at him, but Dave's skin is prickling with awareness; every gust of air makes his spine tingle.

"Whatever you say, you cheating cheater," Dave says, and sidesteps really fast.

Karkat lands on the ladder with a rattling thud when Dave's foot has barely touched the second rung and he's still mostly on the floor. There are armored arms bracketing him, armored feet with their murdertoes curled around the rungs by his knees.

"... Caught me."

Karkat snorts into his hair, nips at the top of his ear with pointy little teeth, pauses. "This was what you wanted, right? You're stinking up the ether with your lust but--"

"Oh my god, don't ruin it," Dave groans, bumping his forehead against the closest rung.

Teeth close on his neck, just firm enough to feel the pressure without breaking the skin. He wishes they were duller right now, having a chunk taken out of his muscle is not the sensation he wants.

Still good. He tries not to shiver, fails.

"You've got some serious crossed wires about sex and survival," Karkat muses, his mouth traveling along the side of Dave's neck. "Then again, play-hunting is fun for us too..."

Karkat hunting him. _Hngh_.

Dave leans back a little, leans into him. He's warm, solid, he doesn't budge. Won't let Dave run away. It's good. He doesn't really want to.

"Yeah I. That was nice. Bit short but."

One of Karkat's arms lifts off the rungs, comes around Dave's chest, his shoulder; Karkat shifts his weight forward for balance, pushing Dave against the ladder.

"Okay, this is one place in the apartment we haven't done it before I guess," Dave says, voice hitching a little.

"Touch yourself," Karkat says in his ear, low and contented like a huge purring tiger, not even bothering to acknowledge Dave's nervous blather.

Dave touches himself.

He curls a hand around his dick and starts pumping it slowly, rocking just a little bit against the demon molded against his back. He'd like Karkat's hand instead but he's holding himself up with it, he's holding Dave around the chest, possessive and warm, and it's good too. Eyes closed, Dave imagines him watching (and more interested than amused for once, as long as they're making things up.)

"Bossy little fuck," Dave mumbles, lower lip caught between his teeth. "Don't even get why--"

Shit, there's demon crotch against his ass, Karkat's mound rolling slow and steady in time with Dave's hand, and it's not wishful thinking that Karkat is breathing a little deeper. Dave's hand mysteriously speeds up. Oh, fuck yes, please.

"Which one do you want more?" Karkat asks; his voice is doing that little background ratcheting cricket noise. "You fucking me or me fucking you?"

"Going down on you," Dave pants, head bowed, forehead pressing against the wood. It makes Karkat's shelled arm press hard against the underside of his chin, makes it feel a little like he's holding him by the neck. "Tonguefucking you and then whatever you want, bending me over, s'good but Jesus just ride my face, ride my ass I don't even care which I just--"

"Yeah, okay," Karkat breathes, right in his ear, "I'll think about it."

Dave's core muscles clench like a fist around his guts, curl his back, rock his hips. The noise he makes is breathless and strangled and high. Shuddering, he leans his weight into Karkat without thinking, but the demon holds him up without a word, doesn't even hint that he's about to dump Dave and his sudden weight on the floor; Dave allows his eyes to close, his body to loosen, allows himself to rest like this.

"... You serious, or did you just say that to make me shoot my load?"

His head is rolling limply on Karkat's shoulder; he cracks an eye open, squints sideways.

"Are you kidding me, if I had known it was the magic orgasm button I'd have mashed it weeks ago." Dave feels a smirk against his cheek. Mmmm. "I thought you were tired, too."

Dave groans, closes his eyes again. "I'm fucking exhausted, it's killing me that you're so goddamn perky."

"You big baby."

"Mm."

They stand a moment in silence -- well, Dave stands, sort of, most of his weight on Karkat; Karkat hangs off the ladder like a monkey or maybe a cicada, almost more at ease than on flat ground. Dave likes it though, likes having their heads at the same height. Likes the cuddles.

So of course Karkat makes his shoulder jump to bounce Dave's head off it.

"Come on, asshole, time for all good little summoners to be snug as a bug in a fucking grub, or something."

"I shot my jizz on the underside of the stairs," Dave mutters.

"You know what? Because I've had a fucking awesome day and I'm not sleeping for a while and you're going to crash if I don't put you to bed _right_ now, I will be the soul of generosity and go back to clean it up. I will clean your baby batter off the stairs, Dave, now if you don't put your foot on the ladder and make with the climbing I am going to clean it up with that limp mop you call your hair. Come on, up, up, I'm not carrying you."

Dave really wants to be spoiled right now, but Karkat kind of is spoiling him already. Sighing, he reaches up. "Why aren't you carrying me, though. You stole all my strength with your wiles." Yawn. "You succubus."

His ass is about level with Karkat's face and he wasn't really thinking about it until Karkat thwacks it with the back of his knuckles. Whoa. Then the demon is climbing the ladder _around_ him somehow, freaky insect strength--

"Oh, _fine_. Don't move," Karkat says, and wraps an arm just under his ribs, and hauls him the rest of the way up.

It's awkward and ridiculous and Dave rubs and bumps into things he would rather not rub and bump into when his dick is not even contained by any underpants, and when Karkat shoves him over the edge of the mezzanine Dave hurries to roll onto his hip and drag himself free of Karkat's body by his hands, and laughs a little.

"There," Karkat says, vindicated, "you happy?"

"Yeah," Dave says.

Yeah.

He rolls onto his futon, makes a half-hearted attempt to pull the comforter out from under himself... Nah, hopeless. That's cool. He'll just sleep here, bareassed and all.

Clicking his tongue, Karkat rolls him onto one side, tugs the comforter down, rolls him onto his other side, onto the fresh sheets underneath.

"I love you," Dave says, because fuck, when someone tucks you in and they're not the asshole contractually obligated to wipe your ass or face the Child Protection services in mortal combat, you tell them that.

... Also because it's true, but it's truer right now, because...

Because.

"I know," Karkat says after a little pause.

The ladder creaks under his weight. Gone cleaning, maybe.

"Still don't entirely get it, but I know."

He doesn't get into bed with Dave when he comes back, but he doesn't jump off and go watch some TV instead, play a game, run laps around the apartment, even though his foot taps absently on the futon. He sits against the headboard and pulls out his laptop, and his knee touches Dave's back, between the shoulder blades.

Click. Dark.

"Get some sleep, you ridiculous twit, you're shattered."

"You're the one who's too... mnh. Gone mad with power. Shoulda known your Price would do that."

"I wish I had known," Karkat says, absently amused. The lights change on the wall as he scrolls down.

"You'd have done something different?"

A short sigh. "... Yeah, okay. Apart from bitching more, not really. Oh well, that's over now, and I'm not going on a diet any time soon."

"Mm. Blimpkat the Terrible."

"When I evolve to Level Five and take that as my by-name you will be the sorriest asshole on any plane of existence that ever existed."

Heh.

\--

He dreams. He's being cradled in a titanic Karkat's hands, a handful of sun-warmed water, and it feels safe.

He's had that dream before, he thinks briefly, but of course he would have, it's such a nice one, why wouldn't he? He sleeps.


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> contains previously seen levels of gore and dark stuff, some quickly mentioned eye-related trauma;  
> contains another potentially triggering thing that hasn't happened before (not sex-related); more spoilery details in the end chapter notes.

**Randal Starchild** @xXxchildofstarsxXx  
@cruorGuardian **have you heard about the #demoninvasion yet????**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
@xXxchildofstarsxXx **YES, ON ACCOUNT OF WORKING ON THE CASE, LIKE JUST ABOUT TWO THIRDS OF THE COPS CURRENTLY IN TOWN. WHY?**

 **Randal Starchild** @xXxchildofstarsxXx  
@cruorGuardian **what's going on????**

 **Whitney Nothouston** @notwhitneyhoustonsrsly  
@cruorGuardian W **hat do you know about it?**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
@xXxchildofstarsxXx @notwhitneyhoustonsrsly **PRETTY SURE WE HAVE SEVERAL SITES THAT REPORT ON NEW EVENTS IN REAL TIME.**

 **Whitney Nothouston** @notwhitneyhoustonsrsly  
@cruorGuardian **Oh come on don't play innocent! What do you know AS A DEMON.**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
@notwhitneyhoustonsrsly **A GREAT MANY THINGS YOUR FEEBLE MIND WILL NEVER GRASP.**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
@notwhitneyhoustonsrsly **BUT RE: #demoninvasion WHY DO YOU ASSUME I HAVE INSIDER KNOWLEDGE, TURDBRAIN? I'M *ALREADY* IN THIS PLANE OF EXISTENCE. BEEN FOR AGES.**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
@notwhitneyhoustonsrsly **DO YOU THINK THERE'S A NEWSLETTER SYSTEM TO KEEP US POOR EXPATRIATED ASSHOLES UPDATED ON THE STATE OF REAL CIVILIZATION, MAYBE?**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian  
@notwhitneyhoustonsrsly **I KNOW WHAT I'VE SEEN WITH MY OWN PHYSICAL EYES. MOST OF WHICH THE GOOD CAPTAIN WOULD WITHHOLD CUPCAKES OVER ME SHARING IN ADVANCE OF THE INVESTIGATION.**

 **Lola Ladiyah** @LoLaLaLa  
@cruorguardian **hahaha oh nooo not the cupcakes!!!!!**

 **Karkat Vantas @cruorGuardian  
** @LoLaLaLa **WHEN THE DEMON REVOLUTION COMES YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE I WILL SPARE. (#FUCKINGJOKING #STFUCONCERNPOLICE)**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian **  
I CAN TELL YOU GUYS THAT ATM I AM BORED AS SIN, THOUGH. WATCHING PEOPLE DO ACTUAL USEFUL WORK AND BEING A GLORIFIED GUARD DOG. #yay #candycrushtime**

 **Goku Son** @andyDBZ777  
@cruorguardian **hey hey heyeh if u gotta kill a stray demon today can u take pics #demoninvasion**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian **  
** @andyDBZ777 **WOW, THAT IS NOT CREEPILY VOYEURISTIC AT ALL. ALSO NO I DON'T DO MEAT DELIVERIES.**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian **  
** @andyDBZ777 **I'LL ASK DAVE.**

 **Dave Strider** @turntechgodhead  
@cruorguardian @andyDBZ777 **consider it asked and the answer being no sorry buddy**

 **Dave Strider** @turntechgodhead  
@cruorguardian **i understand the yay a grossweird thing feels your followers got but geolocalization is a thing**

 **Dave Strider** @turntechgodhead  
@cruorguardian **also like i dont care if you candycrush it up when work is boring but you realize ppl from work follow you on here right**

 **Dave Strider** @turntechgodhead  
@cruorguardian **just checkin**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian **  
** @turntechgodhead **YOU REALIZE THOSE SAME PEOPLE CAN SEE YOU CHECKING TWITTER AND ANSWERING IT DURING WORK HOURS AS WELL, RIGHT?**

 **Dave Strider** @turntechgodhead  
@cruorguardian **mutually assured destruction then B)**

 **Karkat Vantas** @cruorGuardian **  
** @turntechgodhead **HUH! AND HERE I THOUGHT YOU DIDN'T LIKE ME LIKE THAT. THIS ILLUMINATES A STARTLING NUMBER OF YOUR MOST ANNOYING BEHAVIORS!**

 **Jade Harley** @gardengnostic  
@turntechgodhead @cruorguardian **guys theres a class 3 coming up, can you maybe stop flirting and get off twitter or should i email???**

\--

Five PM rolls around and Rose and Jade gather the scientists, while John and Dave and Karkat do a last perimeter check, and they all trek back out of the no-man's-land to where they parked the cars. There are lower class demons everywhere -- mostly vermin, too scared of them to approach -- and at some point Professor Qing makes everyone stop to take readings as a Class One spontaneously materializes out of thin air right over the rusty circle of a manhole.

(Blahblah circle symbolism blah blah door between over and underground realms blah blah fascinating. Dave admits it was cool to watch. Sadly enough the new demon committed the mistake of being a Thief of Light while Vriska was riding Rose, so it doesn't even make it off the manhole.)

John and Rose and Kankri take the dude professor and the dude assistant; Jade, in bright, interested conversation with Prof Qing, gets Qing's gentle-spoken, elegant butt in the car with Dave and Karkat.

"So that I know what I'm hiding from the masses," Karkat interrupts as Jade is distracted backing out of her parking spot. "What _did_ you guys find out?"

No matter how uncomfortable he finds her presence -- because the last time they met she was the specialist the university sent to figure out what Dirk had done to Kurloz and his bedroom -- Dave thinks Qing is a pretty nice lady, because she actually tries to answer.

Karkat nods along for two minutes, and then goes, "... Translation, what you guys found was a crate full of a fuckton of the most deliciously obscure professional jargon, and you spent the afternoon cramming your mouths full with it."

In the passenger's seat, Dave pretends to rub at his lips for reasons that aren't that he's hiding a smile, while Jade rolls her eyes at Karkat in the rear view mirror.

"Well, _I_ understood her just fine!" Jade says, snorting.

Karkat grumbles, giving Professor Qing, sitting beside him in the backseat, a personally affronted look. Qing does a Dave and presses her knuckles to her mouth, but her eyes don't have shades on (lack of preparedness!) and it's easy to figure out she's grinning.

(Urgh. Yeah. He can't not like her. Dang.)

"Yeah, well, _I_ didn't understand, and I blame this asshole right here--" Karkat knocks his knuckles against the back of Dave's seat, ow, "for the inadequate language download. How come you know so little about the fabric of goddamn reality, fuckmunch?"

"Hey, if I understood the fabric of reality I might stop letting my girls mess it up on the daily, so it's probably better for my job if I don't."

Qing chuckles gently behind her hand. "My apologies. To be honest there's a lot we don't understand about the phenomenon. Looking at the raw data will take a while. The closest models we have are the super-gates of Cairo and Beijing, but their fluctuations are merely complex, not unpredictable. It does seem like... Well. More like sudden tectonic movement than like tides."

Karkat props an elbow on the back seat and looks up at her, head tilted in casual curiosity. "I thought you _could_ predict tectonic movement, though."

"Often, if there was enough equipment for long enough to build a predictive pattern, but when the tension builds up over thousands of years it's hard to see the tip-off point coming, and if it goes all at once... well."

"If it had gone all at once, you'd think we'd be seeing worse things, though," Jade says as she turns to follow Rose's car down the right avenue. They're about halfway back to the university now. "That or the whole town would be blown up."

Qing nods, black ponytail bobbing. "Yes, it's very encouraging!"

"I for one feel very encouraged," quips Dave, who's still wearing purplish ichor tracks around his ankles and is all out of pocket watches to break.

"But we honestly can't say anything for sure as long as we haven't looked at the data and questioned our Seers properly. The field overview can be very misleading sometimes."

"Gotcha," Jade says, flicking her a grin in the mirror. "We'll tell the boss-man not to promise the mayor the moon."

"I'd appreciate that." A short sigh. "One thing you can tell him is that my colleagues and I are about ninety percent sure that this is going to affect circle summoning for the duration. It shouldn't damage contracts that are already established, but first-contact summonings really should be avoided. The ether is unstable enough that I wouldn't trust protective patterns to work."

Erk.

"Noted," Dave says, laconic. Jesus, they're gonna have to make the boss lean hard on the mayor to issue some kind of official order. The civilians have regulations too but it's not like you need to register your intent to summon for the overwhelming majority of demon types. "You're probably gonna end up on TV," he says. "Scare the townspeople into flying straight for a bit."

"Mm."

Qing gazes at Dave in the mirror for a bit, eyes distant, thoughtful. Dave arches an eyebrow pointedly.

"The detective who summoned that Prince of Rage is related to you, isn't he?"

Dave stiffens a little, tries not to frown. "Brother. Why?" Wait. "Oh. Shit. The circle. He's still got baby Kurloz in his fucking guest bedroom. _Shit_."

"I would strongly advise that he find a safe way to release the demon into the ether, but the circle was complex enough that I don't..." She grimaces. She doesn't know how. A tenured professor of demonology and she doesn't know.

Well. It's not like she had a long time to study Dirk's pattern. But.

He's pulling his phone out of his pocket to call when the radio crackles.

" _Calling all units--_ "

Welp.

"What's going on?" Qing asks -- thankfully, after the message is complete.

"Demon incursion at Gamzee's facility," Karkat answers tensely even as Dave is already calling Rose to coordinate. She has two scientists in her car and --

"The Bard of Rage? Oh my. If the seals placed on him--"

"Yeah," Dave says, and tries not to be grim. All Dispatch knew to say was that a 'severe' incursion had been repelled, that they were holding for now _but_. "Karkat can talk him down. Hey, Rose, so which one of us gets to be designated driver?"

"Oh, I could maybe help with--" Qing starts to offer, brow wrinkled in worry, and Jade grins in the mirror.

"You could pretty please take a taxi to safety? We'll have summoners on site who can handle the resealing. I'm really sorry we can't drive you back to the university, but --"

" _A taxi, great idea_ ," Rose says in the phone, and her car turns into -- wait, no, that street goes farther from... Oh, right, train station, there'll be taxis.

"They'll be safe?" Dave asks sotto voce.

" _They're all three summoners, I think they'll manage_ ," Rose replies dryly. " _They're not going to be in any more danger than just about anyone else in town._ "

\--

They get to the edge of town and park a little ways off the facility that the government uses to monitor the Gate and the police used to stash Gamzee. There are other cars converging -- Jane's car, hot on their heels, and when Dave's crew exits their vehicles she parks with a sudden, vicious turn of her wheel and leaps out.

There's a baby Level Four officer with her, Sumire or something, fresh off the academy. Jane was probably showing her the ropes. (He wonders if Dirk will still have a partner when they let him come back. Eech. He's relatively sure Jane won't be replacing him with Sumire, she's a newbie, but.)

"Situation?" Jane asks Rose as they creep closer to the (open; wrong) portal in the high wall. Rose looks meaningfully at Kankri, who frowns.

"You need a power boost?" John asks under his breath.

"Thank you, John, that won't be necessary." Kankri sneaks Karkat a look with his little eyes, his major eyes closed. Dave wonders what he's tracking -- magic?

"I am grateful and relieved to announce that the guilty party was not the Felt."

Well, that's something. Dave relaxes a little.

"The embodied Bard of Rage known as Gamzee is still inside. He is not..."

"Contained?"

"He is _somewhat_ contained." A deeper frown on Kankri's gray face. "I think. For now."

"Reassuring!" Jane says, before Dave can. "Sumire, wait until the signal, and then you follow me. John--"

"Taking point," John says cheerfully. "Roxy's not working right now, right?" He doesn't even wait; his legs blur, become horse legs.

"You goddamn furry," Dave mumbles at him, and almost goes flying over Karkat's back when John playfully nudges him with all of Equius' characteristic gentleness.

Jane is second behind John, fish scales glittering on her skin, and Dave and Jade and Rose wait until they're given the all clear before they follow, low to the ground and guns and demons loaded. (Kankri minces in last, wings curled tight and tail raised to whip around in a hurry.)

The place used to be a farm, which means the house has a pretty big lawn.

It is _littered_ with demon chunks. Also whole demons, fallen without any apparent damage, which Jane confirms dead in quick whispers as they pass them.

" _Someone_ had a good meal," Karkat mutters as he squints at a rubber-looking millipede-cat thing.

"Yeah, thanks for the jinx," Dave mutters back, because the thought of finding a well-fed demon laired in here is not one that pleases him much. This was a veritable swarm of Class Twos and Threes. If something managed to eat them all _plus_ Gamzee the Pain in Dave's Ass it'll be a real problem to clean up.

They reach the house -- front door locked, so they separate in two groups and go around the back. Gravel makes it hard to keep to a quiet approach, but the windows on the ground floor are boarded up. A few thin, ornamental trees provide no cover to worry about...

"Grier!" Karkat calls out when they see him standing by the door to the courtyard, and leaps ahead like a bulldog-cricket. "Grier, are you alright? Where's -- oh. Oh, that doesn't look good."

The wry look Detective-Summoner Grier sends Karkat has Dave hurrying, too.

"Situation's contained," Grier says in his oldest old man's voice, all gritty and tired.

Dave hops over the two steps, looks into the room behind him.

It's a long, low-roofed room that was probably either a giant garage or a party room, all repainted clinical white and papered with seals. Containment -- Dave recognizes the little folded-in corners, they're really similar to the ones Dirk did up for Kurloz in his bedroom.

Dave can see the seals mostly as smoke trails and erupted paint, bare bricks showing darkened with soot underneath, with a few paint lines surviving here and there to give the feel of the whole design without being burdened with that pesky "actually doing something" thing.

In the middle of the room, the middle of the circle, there's a long brown, tired couch. On the couch there's Gamzee, sprawled with all his length on his belly. Dave's heart skips a little, then slows down -- their Probably Evil Problem Child is still here, he's calm, he looks _content_.

Sitting -- slumping -- against the wall with her stretched-out legs almost touching the inner circle is Detective Burnett.

She's got a guitar on her lap; she's strumming like she has no idea what she's doing, and humming a song under her breath that sounds like she's making it up as she goes.

There's blood all over her face, dripping from her nose in fat trails, from her ears; when she turns her head to look toward Karkat and Dave a red tear rolls down her face. Her eyes look weird, sunken in --

No, her eyeballs do.

It's not just blood making wet on her face. Oh, Christ.

" _Crocker!_ " Jade yells from behind Dave's shoulder. Karkat leaps inside; Dave takes a few steps after Karkat, can't bring himself to rush, to get close. Is there even still a reason to rush? Oh, fuck, he actually does want to throw up.

"The researchers are all upstairs," Grier says from the door, and doesn't follow them in. "All safe and sound. Not a single demon got through."

"... Did you fucking contract to a Class Four," Karkat rasps at Burnett, tense like he's going to pounce. "Did you fucking contract to _Gamzee_."

"Mm-hm," she hums. Her whole body is limp; her hands shake on the strings. (Are her nails splintered? Ow.)

Well, that explains the unmarked demon corpses outside. Hellfire and brimstone, how did she plan to _hold him_? How did she plan to stop him turning on her and those she was protecting once he was done _feasting_?

Karkat hisses between his teeth, steals the words from Dave's mouth. "That was really, _really_ stupid."

"Oh hey, best friend!"

As Jane races in, Karkat steps aside, then pads to the couch, ignoring he containment seals like... well, like they're just meaningless markings now. Haha. Awesome. "Hey, you big lump. You fed enough now? She can stop?"

Gamzee pushes himself on his side so he can grin at Karkat, lazy and welcoming. His dolphin-mermaid tail curls like he's waving; he ignores Dave and Jane going fish-scaly and the rest of them like they're not even here. "Oh, yeah, sure. Was hells of careful so the little rage sister would not explode," Gamzee says, "Because she all up and belongs to my brother, see?"

"... Yeah," Karkat says quietly. "Yeah, she does."

"A motherfucker could do with a spot of cuddles now though."

Karkat's body... sags, or goes soft, in a way that shouldn't come through so clearly when he's shelled and pointy all over. "Yeah, yeah," he rasps quietly, "hold your horses."

Karkat hops on the couch. Dave finds himself something to do elsewhere.

\--

"Crocker? We've got journalists."

Looking up from the notes she's taking, Jane grimaces. Yeah, he feels her. Grier and Burnett have just gone off in the ambulance two minutes ago, so she's the senior officer on the scene. Dave is kind of very glad she's got three years on him right now.

"How many?" Jane asks, brow crinkled in unsurprised displeasure.

"Only three so far. This ain't exactly a populated neighborhood." They've got several acres of grass just around this one house, and lots of trees in between, and the next house is like five minutes away on foot and belongs to one of the senior researchers. This is barely inside city limits. Dave's not even sure how they knew.

"Thank God for that. Sorry," she says to the scientist she was interviewing, "I've got to take care of this, but Detective Lalonde will... Hm."

Detective Lalonde is busy documenting the fucked-up Gamzee circle and humming under her breath in happy interest. John, following with his own notebook, looks up and grins hopefully.

"I heard journalists?"

"No, John," Jane replies, sliding him an unimpressed, amused side-look.

"Aw, come on, I like talking to them and you don't!"

"And five minutes in you'd tell them the grand heroic tale of Burnett, who bet the whole neighborhood on her ability to corral a Class Four."

Yeah, um. John isn't _that_ naive, but... well, being friendly and approachable with the journalists only helps to make sure they spin it in the cops' favor _some_ of the time.

Meanwhile Jane does a mean "no comment".

"I'll come with you," Dave says. "Stand in the background all suave and pretty."

(That way he won't have to catch glimpses of Karkat combing his armored fingers with infinite gentleness through Gamzee's eldritch mop.)

(Okay, also he's done interviewing his share of the scientists anyways, so it's the journalists or the cadaver cleanup.)

Outside on the grass (on the side by the street, therefore in full sight of the journalists) Kankri is peering at various demon chunks, making little 'hmm!' and 'I see!' noises to himself, not even quite under his breath. Dave isn't too sure what he's looking at, but he is pretty sure that if he asked, Kankri would actually tell him. Which, he'll pass. There's only so much time he keeps blocked out in a day to be called stupid in entertaining ways, and Karkat is territorial about it.

Sumire has been guarding the front gate, and she stands with her hands behind her back in a posture more military than police-like; when she hears the gravel under their feet and recognizes Jane's voice she loosens all at once, and is quick to step to the side to let Jane step up. Dave sneaks her a discreet wink behind Jane's back and models standing at Jane's shoulder until the girl imitates him, baby face too serious.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," Jane says briskly, and Dave bites back a snort. She sounds like her uncle the good Captain. He wonders if her dad also sounds like that.

There's only three of them -- no, four, a last guy approaching at a jog with a small camera swinging from his hand. Not the big channels, thank God, but it'll land there either way soonish.

"Detective! What happened here?" a woman asks.

"Detective Crocker--"

"Was it another gang-related--"

"It was," Jane interrupts, "a low-class demon incursion. Preliminary reports hint that upon fleeing from the town proper they went looking for the most magic-rich environment they could find. Sadly for them," she adds with a dry little smile, "they invaded a state research facility that contained a contracted corporeal Class Four."

Haa, nice fudging. Dave sticks his hands in his pockets and tries to will the pack to not notice the sad, purpled state of his demon-hunting pants. At the moment they're busy typing down what Jane just said, though.

"So how many casualties amongst the personnel?" the dude with the camera asks with a ghoulish grin. (Because of course they've seen the ambulance. And even if they hadn't, well... the piles of demon chunks on the grass are kind of a nice hint.)

"None! The only casualty was one of the police officers assigned to the facility for the duration of the demon incursion. At the moment I can offer no information on--"

"Is he _dying_?"

"No," Jane replies, not even sounding annoyed. "At the moment, we do not expect the life of the police officer to be in danger. I don't have any more information than that on the topic."

The journalists prod; Jane parries. Dave looks at the trees on the other side of the road. He thinks it's someone's property, but the house itself is nowhere to be seen, lost behind enough huge pines to block out sunlight under them.

"Excuse me -- Detective Strider? Is that your -- Karkat?"

Blink. Okay, another of the journalists has decided to switch targets. Oh well. "No, that's Kankri, Detective Lalonde's demon."

"Oh. They're very... similar."

"If you're having a hard time telling them apart, mine's the travel-sized one."

"Detective, that is an uncharitable way of putting it." Kankri scolds him, in the tone of someone who is secretly pleased. "Karkat's physical--"

A sudden, abrupt stop, and Dave is turning around to check on him and too bad for if that's rude to the journalists, and--

Kankri screeches, " _Strider, down!_ "

Space tears, a rush of air. Dave's hand goes for his gun.

Dave is kneeling on the ground. Something punched him in the back of the thigh.

Oh, there's blood.

There's a crack -- another crack -- bullet, and he throws himself to the side, trying to get out of the open gate and behind the wall; Sumire stumbles over him as she steps backward. (People are yelling. Probably the journalists.) His leg drags in the dust, oddly weak, lagging to respond.

A flash of light in the garden, and his head whiplashes around. On the grass Kankri throws himself to the side and over a demon corpse like a startled frog. Clover is behind him, something large draped between his hands -- another man, too. Clover flashes to cut off Kankri's retreat -- someone else shoots; Jane yells. Hold on until Karkat notices, Jade and Rose and John --

Can't shoot, Kankri's in the way. He calls on Aradia, her wheel of seasons, spring approaching in a great enthusiastic outburst with still the bite of winter on the breeze.

He calls on to her and the world breaks. His hearing skips, freezes for a little eternity, jackhammers in fits and spurts, and he can't -- Damara instead, he tries but his head is swimming. There's a great clanging noise in his ears and there's -- there's hands on him, touching his shoulder and his eyes were closed.

He opens them onto Sumire's dead, surprised face, her body stretched out half on the path and half on top of the grass.

Beat. Behind her in the middle of the demon corpses Kankri is trying to fight his way out of a cold iron net.

Beat. There's Karkat bursting at the corner of the house in slow-motion, and then he blinks and there's Jade too --

His head is still ringing. He turns it -- like moving through molasses -- and it's not Jane's hand on his shoulder.

Yank. His heels drag past the gate. Flash of light -- Kankri and Clover gone -- Karkat rams the other Felt man in the ribs head first; there's a crack. Dave still has his gun in hand.

He lifts it. There's a streak of blood all over the barrel where he pressed against his thigh. His knuckles are wet.

Time hiccups again and for a moment he -- Karkat is _still_ racing to him, Jade kicks the fallen Felt in the jaw in passing and then he blinks and it happens again, and -- slow and then too fast, did it happen different? He can't _grasp_ onto, can't, something is wrong with -- his mind, Latula --

They drag him through a forest of legs, all turned toward Karkat -- the journalists? Wait, no, the journalists are off to the side, and --

\-- Jane is on the road, on all fours with blood sprayed like fine mist on the side of her face (Sumire's), and he tries to lift the gun and it takes a whole decade, it stutters and goes back a hundred, a thousand times -- wrist up, then down again -- and then his hand hurts, is empty; no more gun. No more gun, no Aradia, no Damara, no--

He throws up. Someone is dragging him on his ass and heels and he throws up on his own shirt, remembers to try squirming; Karkat is coming (still so far away, why is this taking so long, minutes, hours) --

They lift him off the ground and he tries to get his feet under him (time has stopped being so wrong) and Jane stands up.

"Put him down, now," she snaps, gun up, and --

She falls.

Face down on pavement, she falls.

(There's another flash of light and Clover and his friend reappear and Kankri in the net snarling.)

("Oh _fuck_ man, he told you not that one--")

(" _Snowman go go go_ \--")

He can see inside Jane a bit. He can see white things, wet things that don't make sense.

A hand (dark-skinned, elegant, signet ring) lands on his shoulder, a hand (matching, minus the ring) on Kankri's net, and then he doesn't even blink but he's still blind with it, suddenly dark, dark and enclosed and damp.

He's shoved down on his front, arms twisted back hard (not his shoulder again, fuck) (oh, Jane.) Cold hard metal around his wrists. Snick. Locked.

Lifted off his feet and shoved in -- is that a truck. Back of a truck. No wonder Jade couldn't teleport closer, the woman's dark hands and high cheekbones are hard to stare at, her clothes feel unreal and twisting, Kanaya's --

He can't -- he presses his cheekbone against the gritty bottom of a delivery truck and he breathes. His brain feels scrambled, he can't _think_ and Kankri is making these tiny, high-pitched noises of pain and his voice sounds so much like Karkat's -- a couple of his tail blades press through the net, poke against Dave's pants near the place that's wet and hot with pain, and...

What was even real in this whole _mess_ in his head--

_... I'm sorry, Firetruck. Dave. She died._

"No."

_I'm really, really sorry. It was real. That part was real. I'm sorry I couldn't -- I can't even really tell what the mad trippy Time parts were about, I didn't even -- I can't feel them any way but through your mind and I --_

" _No_."

No. Not Jane.

And Sumire. But he didn't _know_ her, she was a stranger in a matching uniform and _he didn't know her_ , he never crushed on her when he was thirteen and she was an unattainable, womanly sixteen, Sumire never bandaged his wounds and clicked her tongue at him and smirked, a bit awkward and a bit flattered at how subtle he hadn't been, never put on a three-piece suit and a fake moustache for Halloween and gallantly tilted her hat at him, never invited him over for dinner and complained about her aquariums, oh shit, who's gonna feed the fish now --

 _Latula_ , he says, burning eyes closed tight. _I need to -- I need to not feel this for a little bit._

_... You got it, firetruck._

He breathes out.

Okay.

Jane is dead.

Kankri is caught. Karkat was left behind.

It's gonna start to hurt very soon. Dave brings up lava cool like blood, ruined fortresses, broken places that have lived, monstrous hearts that still try to beat.

 _I order you to stay with Rose_ , he thinks -- visualizes, Karkat and Rose, Karkat patrolling around Rose, obeying Rose, _not coming after him_. Dave is bait and hook all in one and the least he can do is not tear Karkat's mind with the need, the old standing order to be at Dave's side, or at least in hearing distance.

The truck floor trembles and roars under him. He opens his eyes, takes in what he can see. The windows are darkened but light still gets in. There's a Felt member in with them, maybe two, leaning against the back doors.

Also, Dave's ankles are tied together. He's not sure when that happened. Was kind of -- distracted.

"Kankri, status," he asks, turning his head to face him. (His shoulders ache. He's not sure if either one of them popped out again.)

Kankri is curled in as much of a ball as he can, entangled in iron wires, his arms around his head to shield his face. When he peeks out over his elbow with a single red eye Dave sees his soft, fuzzy cheek charred dark in long crisscrossing lines, and then his horn catches in the net and he inhales hard through his nose, startles back like he's been shocked.

"My right wing is broken," he says through gritted teeth. "Tail tip--"

"Hey, be quiet," one of the Felt mooks interrupts, nudging Dave in the knee. It makes his other leg move and the wound spurts, he can feel the blood spreading along the line of his thigh against the floor. He's not even sure if he wants to say anything. A bandage would be nice but for all he knows they'll kick him in the wound hoping it'll make Karkat come faster.

He tries to meet Kankri's eyes, but Kankri has burrowed in his own arms again. Shit. He really wants some kind of team behind him right now, and Kankri is all he's got--

"I don't need to look at you with my _eyes_ ," Kankri whispers between gritted teeth. "Consider eye contact established."

Dave snorts, mouth quirking into something he's not sure he would even call a smirk. The mook snaps, " _Hey_."

He allows the truck to rock him, eyes closing again. His brain pulses in pain, a deep, weary ache, and his leg feels brightly raw from hip to knee, even though he knows the wound is a lot smaller than that. His hand, too, where someone tore the gun out of his fingers.

Also he's chest down in a bit of his puke.

Gonna burn this fucking outfit.

_Latula?_

_Yes_ , she replies promptly, serious. _I'm here._

Yeah. He still has Latula.

 _No intel for you right now but if I get any, can you ask Mituna to run it to Bro?_ Hopefully he'll know to call the cops and not come charging himself...

 _I'm... not sure Mituna feels really good today_ , Latula says, and if she were human she'd be chewing on her lip pretty good. _But I'll ask._

_Bro will pay him._

_You should know better than to promise Mituna's price sight unseen,_ Latula chides him gently. _Especially in other peeps' name._

... Yeah, he does know better.

_Okay, then I will. In a circle and everything. I'll sit my ass down and draw the best pattern I ever drew. It'll have as many dicks as he wants it to have._

_Haha, now that's a bit 'Tuna's speed. Okay, I'll see what I can do._

He feels better now. Less alone. He's got a line of communication; a chancy one, but...

A while later -- maybe five minutes and maybe fifteen, his sense of time is still fucked up -- darkness comes back and they dip down into probably an underground parking lot. Kankri moans very quietly -- his wing getting jostled, probably. Dave isn't sure he wants to see the break; what does it look like inside, like a crab leg? How do you even start to fix that by hand, without any Life demons?

(Shit, who are they going to ask to heal them now that Jane is dead. He presses his face against the gritty floor, eyes scrunched closed; Latula smooths down the spike of feelings until the hurt is gone.)

The truck stops, opens. Dave is rolled onto his side, onto his thigh; lights bloom under his eyelids. He doesn't warn them when they pull him up that he's gonna throw up again.

"Oh, urgh."

"Carry now, clean up _later_ \-- huh. He's been bleeding like a stuck pig."

"Hell, my clothes."

"Yeah, dead loss by now."

He is moved, almost gently, across some tall dude's massive shoulders. His head is swimming, his sight keeps blurring out, it's a pain. He cranes his head back as the guy starts to walk, sees Kankri pulled onto a trolley, net and all.

Looks like a private parking lot; they're not bothering to close the truck, with the dark puddle right in the middle. Or hide Kankri. Or Dave.

"Hey, where's Velize?" the dude not carrying asks the rest of the room.

There's an odd moment of silence, and Dave stiffens, just a little, ears pricking.

"Mister Velize won't be coming," a new voice says -- Dave starts to crane his neck some more but the brick wall carrying him generously turns in the right direction.

It's a guy in an immaculate business suit, a surprising bright green button-up shirt underneath. He is bald like an egg, even though he doesn't look that old. He doesn't look young, either, it's hard to judge. Behind him is the black lady -- Snowman -- that Dave met that one time on the roof. No shadows to hide her face now, but Dave can't spare a second to fix her in his memory; the bald dude is standing by Kankri's trolley and Kankri's eyes are wide open and staring at nothing, like he's desperately trying to stay still and not make eye contact lest he attracts the guy's attention.

"Mister Velize was warned beforehand that Ms Crocker was not disposable, and disregarded that."

Dave's heart spasms, his guts clench on a scream that won't come out. Latula blankets it all under scales white like snow.

"I'm afraid we do not need people who cannot retain basic instructions in this organization," the man says as he walks slowly to Dave and the mountain under him, hands behind his back like the douchiest, smuggest philosophy teacher Dave has ever heard of, "now less than ever."

They're going to kill him the second they can. No way they'd tell him they're approaching endgame otherwise.

The man's dress shoes ring sharp on the cement floor as he does his considering shark approach, and one last time as he stops, almost in arm's reach of the mountain.

"Permit me to offer you my condolences" falls from his lips and Dave's dim, damp world briefly goes white.

"Yeah, thanks," Latula says with his mouth, as rage closes his throat on a wordless snarl.

That... fucker. That _fucker_.

Jane. Oh god, Jane.

 _Let me talk to him,_ he thinks, even as he knows he really, really shouldn't. (Even as he knows that if he tried she couldn't stop him, but Latula is right, Latula is _really_ right.)

 _Vetoed, sorry_ , Latula plays along, too gentle.

"You know where to bring them," the bag of douche says, turning away, gathering Snowman (the _second or third in command_ of the whole organization) to him with a single wordless, casual glance.

The good little Felt minions re-start their trek to the elevator and whatever lies beyond. Tied hands and feet, Dave doesn't even bother to fight it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A secondary canon character gets killed. (for people who really need more than that, there are EVEN MORE SPOILERY SPOILERS at [this link.](http://asukaskerian.tumblr.com/post/135087898000/demon-patrol-29-spoiler-warnings))


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From now on I will delete without answering the reviews that do nothing but complain about my update speed. They are not constructive, not helpful, and not welcome.
> 
> If you believe you're helping by reminding me that my stories exist and are still expected, then ... that's nice of you, but it's not helping at all, it just links the story and a feeling of guilt and helplessness in my mind and achieves exactly the opposite of what you were hoping for. 
> 
> I have had serious issues with writing the last couple of years. More pressure is absolutely the last thing I need. Thank you for understanding.

Dave's cell is actually a cellar -- bare cement floor, old brick walls, a dying light bulb. They don't even bother to tie him to the surviving shelves.

He lies there on the rough floor and stares at the ceiling as the big dude paws at his bleeding thigh, wraps a quick length of bandage over the pants. It hurts but he's too exhausted to even twitch.

Neither of the thugs say a damn thing to him as they walk out and lock him in. Their footsteps echo down the corridor and then the light turns off and there's quiet.

The shoddy bandaging job is confirmation they don't care much if he dies eventually, so long as he lasts a little while longer. It's such bullshit. What'd he ever do to any of them? Apart from being a cop, but the majority of other cops in this town don't get such specialized attention.

Okay, so he has Karkat.

... Karkat must be freaking out right now. Dave sighs, blows a lock of hair out of his eyes, and heaves to roll himself off his goddamn wrists. His thigh flashes stabbing pain at him for a couple of seconds when his hips twist, slowly recedes into more normal don't-fucking-touch-it levels of ouch.

After another couple of minutes just breathing and bracing himself, he sits up, legs stretched before himself.

Jesus, his pants feel soaked. He's probably going to leave a trail.

"Hey, Kankri, you here?"

No response. He calls again, louder, though he's already feeling like he's alone in this fucking corridor. Can't hear anyone breathe, and freaking-out Kankri would breathe loud, and probably also rant in between two lungfuls.

"Kankri _Vantas!_ "

God he wishes he knew his Name. He wishes he could _use_ it.

Something knocks hard on the bottom wall, three times in quick succession.

"... Kanks? That you?"

" _Obviously!_ " Kankri says, muffled, from the other side. " _Now will you please -- do your **knight thing** \-- I'm still in this thrice-damned fucking net and it **hurts!**_ "

Well.

Well. "Yeah, okay," Dave says, though he's drained, tired down to his bones of this shit, and injured, again.

He closes his eyes. Aradia hasn't answered him in a while (with all the Time-aligned guys in the Felt he's pretty sure he knows why), but there may yet be a miracle. He gathers her Name to him, his awareness of all the details of it he was granted to know, all the little edges and dark corners he glosses over in casual hurry because they both know she'll know who he means anyway.

Six minutes. Ten. He listens to his own breathing, to the sound of the dark, imagines he can hear and feel the clean, sharp early-spring breeze at the back of her Name.

Fifteen.

_Hey, Dave._

_Hey, Aradia. Up for some quick and dirty destruction?_

_I just came because of the retainer_ , she says, and it's not really a surprise, but it still kind of hurts. _Can't help you today._

Well, in that case. Rose is going to kill him for what he's about to do. Then Karkat will raise him from the dead and kill him twice.

But maybe only after crying on him that they're glad he's alive. _How do you feel about ten more years off my lifespan._

Aradia laughs a little, but more like she's sorry. _Tempting, but no._

_... A dead Dave? Even though that's worth less in terms of personal sacrifice--_

_I'd have to stay alive to enjoy it, and that's probably not going to happen._

Well, shit.

He can hear Kankri's blades scratching against the wall. Probably still trying to find a position that won't burn him. Maybe trying to make a hole through the bricks, if he's feeling proactive today.

Counting on him, and Dave is dead in the water.

 _Well then. See you later_ , he tells Aradia, and tries not to feel too bitter when she slips out of his mind with the equivalent of a _whoops, my bad_ shrug. He didn't forget she was a demon.

He feels bitter anyway.

After all the times she tried to fuck him over and all the sides she tried to choose that weren't his, he's not feeling hopeful, but he calls on to Damara.

He folds his knee up and tightens the muscles of his thigh so the cloth of his pants pulls taut against his wound and thinks _this blood is for you_ as pain flashes white stars under his eyelids, to make sure she at least pays attention. If she still doesn't answer he'll know she's not just busy, but he's being actively snubbed.

(Shit, it hurts. He's a bit queasy with it.)

 _I'm here,_ Damara rasps from the back of his skull.

 _... Great. Hi. Thanks for coming._ He pauses. _Is it just because of the retainer?_

 _No_ , Damara says, and sounds oddly -- not creepy. Not sexual and not threatening. Casual. _It is because I have a big great want I watch you die._

... Of course. Fucking awesome. Dave opens his eyes -- yep, still dark -- and glares at the door he can barely guess at. _Yeah, okay, you can fuck right off then if you're going to be no help. I know I'm an awesome show but I'm not a **free** show, okay? Seriously, fuck off._

_I did not say I don't help._

Um. Okay, he wasn't expecting that one.

_I help in the ways that don't **save** you, there is space in my oaths for that. I help so you struggle harder, die harder._

She's -- not even purring; she sounds quiet, almost _affectionate_. What the shit.

_... Why?_

_I like you_ , Damara says, and it sounds-feels-resonates half like Karkat's 'watching from afar, what a gorgeous disaster' type of love, and half like...

 _I touch myself when you die, and sad that I can't eat you. I cry three whole tears in your corpse meat, Dave Lalonde Strider. I crave to fuck you dead, but watch you dead is almost that good. So._ A sneer forms on his face, not of his own devising -- a sneer that shakes a little, that still feels hopeful, hesitant like a teenager who just asked someone out on a date and is trying to pretend they don't care if they get turned down. _Do you want I help. Even so._

Dave thinks this is the flip side of the one that goes 'courting your own destruction.'

 _Yeah_ , he says after a few seconds, weighing it. Damara like-likes him. He always thought she was fucking with him when she hit on him; turns out she was fucking with him _and_ hitting on him. _As long as you're aware that I can't feel it back. I don't intend to get myself destroyed._

"Yes," Damara sighs with his mouth. "Fucked up. I like that."

She crumbles the restraints at his wrists with barely a nudge.

His skin has gone old bent gears and rusted tin, paint flaking off, he knows without seeing it; he can feel the mirage flickering into almost-life, _almost_ fooling his sense of touch. Dave rolls on his hip and drags himself toward the far wall.

"Hey, Kankri? Move back, if you can."

They crumble the bricks methodically. By the time there's a hole wide enough to get through Dave is half-blinded from the low light Kankri got to have, and Kankri hasn't managed to wriggle far enough to clear the hole.

(Shit, his gray face has some nice, dark welts. The fuzz has fallen off in places and the ... flesh? soft shell? underneath is purplish.)

_Wanna break down his net, too?_

_Like fuck_ , she laughs. _Kankri can die alone like dog, no one care._

 _Well, I care some, but okay._ "Don't move, bro, coming through." Dave crawls over Kankri's wings and his flank, dragging his leg across hard shelled bumps and metal rope. _How about the door frame?_

She's more amenable to that. The door falls in, missing Dave's head by about two inches. It's not even a full panel, it's cheap wire fence on a frame -- insult to injury there.

There are containment patterns drawn on the floor outside with professional neatness. He smears a bloody hand across the closest curlicue.

Then he sees about carefully rusting the frame until he's left with a one-meter-long metal bar -- L-shape in cross-section, not a full, thick, easy to grasp one, but Damara can't add metal in, so he'll make do. He leans on it to stand up and limps back to Kankri, to see about forcing enough links apart that he can unravel him.

It feels like it takes hours. In the absolute, it takes almost fifteen minutes, struggling with tangled links, helping Kankri roll so he can free a caught wing blade, a twisted-aside back spine. Dave spends the time with his ears pricked toward the corridor, expecting someone to come back to check on them any second now.

Kankri spends it silent, which is really, really unnerving.

"Okay, time to go," Dave whispers, and leans down to pat his shoulder. Hair a mess, face tight in stubbornly restrained pain, he looks too much like Karkat for Dave not to.

Kankri climbs to his feet, one of his wings propping up the other one to keep the hurt finger level.

"Want some blood before we go?"

"... Yes, thank you."

He licks it off Dave's hand perfunctorily. Dave is vaguely glad when it's gross, not even a little bit sexy.

"It'll do for now. Let's go."

They go.

\--

They don't get to go far before they have to stop and go back to try another route. The first staircase they found lands near an open living room and people are talking there, would see them limping past.

Dave does not enjoy having to go back down on his hurt leg, but the worst is by far the sharp staccato noise coming from Kankri's claws on hard floors. When they find a hallway with a carpet in the middle on their next attempt to get up a level Dave is quick to shoo him there. It's not like pressing against the wall will make it less likely for someone to notice his bright red sails, anyway.

The windows along the hallway open onto an inner courtyard, and it's so weirdly misty outside Dave can't get a good idea of the layout. Is there a gate? Front door? A street?

"Did we already pass by this piece of pottery?" Kankri whispers up to him, hunkering down in the middle of the carpet. "I seem to remember the pattern on -- but perhaps it's a set."

He's frowning, looks... really unsure, which is odd because he and Karkat are about equal in their need not to look ignorant or lost _ever_. Dave squints at the vase-thing.

He wants to say it's a set, because they haven't turned enough corners to have circled the whole mansion yet, but the very fact that Kankri even thought to ask makes his cop bullshit detector tingle. "Huh. Can't seer it?"

"It's a random piece of _decoration_ ," Kankri hisses back, tail flicking his annoyance. "No one here has any attachment to it, not even monetary. I can't even perceive a maid hating how difficult it must be to dust--"

"--Hey!" someone shouts from behind them.

Dave whirls around with Damara crackling through him, Damara just as startled as he is and ready to kill for it.

He feels the man's chest turn to open sores and spreading bruises under untouched cloth, he feels the ribs behind begging to be crushed to powder, the lump of meaty heart waiting to rot, and he --

And Damara flinches, and Dave loses the awareness of all that time begging to be crushed and torn and instead a great tear opens in the man's clothes, who's still fumbling for his waistband and his gun.

 _The gun!_ Dave snaps, trying to aim her at that if she won't kill. His skin flickers on and off as she snarls back, hunger for decay warring with -- oh, shit, he has no time to convince her that killing a measly Felt is not going to actually _help_ him, and the gun is coming up --

Something flies from the open door. Something goes thunk, quiet but meaty. The gun tumbles to the carpet and a second later so does the guy, sideways, eyes still open. Dave stares at the dark, protruding thing in his neck for several seconds before he figures out it's the handle of a knife.

"The fuck are you morons doing on the third floor," Jack 'Spades' Slick rasps as he ambles out, throws Dave and Kankri a narrow side-glance, and bends over the still-shuddering corpse to pull out his knife.

Blood gushes, spreads. Damara groans with regret. Dave stares.

"--Mister Slick," Kankri says, voice just a touch shaky. "I -- I did not expect you here. _Especially_ here. May I inquire--"

"Surprise," Slick says, stepping over the corpse, "And no you can't." And then he's in arm's reach of Dave, who blinks.

Then he's closer than that, and Dave half-passed out from leaning too hard on his leg when the thought bubbles up... Hey. Organized crime, yeah, sure. But he's actually not a Felt.

Actually kind of _really_ not a Felt.

"... The hell are _you_ doing here?" he stutters like an idiot, even as Spades steps in to catch Dave's wrist. Oh hell, that might be bad --

Then Slick pulls Dave's arm across his shoulders, taking half his weight. It's... What.

... Is this a _rescue_?

 _Kill him!_ Damara hisses. _Kill him now!_

"Yeah, that's actually a point in favor of talking it out," Dave mumbles as he limps automatically along, disturbed by the casual flank-to-flank contact between him and some dude who was supposed to be in a high-security prison.

Not that he doesn't remember hearing about the escape, just.

Just.

Karkat likes him, he thinks out of nowhere, a bit dazed.

"D'you get socked over the head too?" the man asks.

"The hell if I know," Dave admits, and sneaks the man a look. "... You got a gun I could borrow?"

He could also ask for the one the dead guy dropped, but. He thinks it tumbled down the nearest staircase. Can't see it. 

A dry shrug. Man's got a nicely tailored suit, if scuffed to shit; someone else must buy them for him. Maybe Droog, the man is _dapper_. Dave respects that in a guy.

"I got knives."

"Urgh. Nah."

"Suit yourself."

Dave is not sure where Slick is taking them. Walks like he knows his way; could be bullshitting.

"You still have not said why you find yourself in this place so conveniently," Kankri says, trotting beside them as Slick takes them out of the corridor that circles the courtyard, to a staircase that goes up.

"Conveniently? Hah," he mutters, thin lips twisted in tired disgust. "Conveniently for who exactly."

" _Jack_ ," Kankri growls in a pretty good imitation of Karkat's voice. Oh god, Dave wants Karkat here. He wants him _nowhere near here_. He also wants to not be climbing up stairs, his leg hurts so bad and he can feel the cloth growing wetter at the knee. He tells himself it's not that he's still bleeding, that it's just cloth soaking it up and gravity.

"Stop bitching or I'm leaving you behind," Slick grumbles back, half-hearted, like he actually doesn't mind that much. It's... it's odd as hell. Dave is a bit busy with the blood loss, so he's not sure what exactly is the cause of this odd feeling of unreality, this sudden desire to laugh and lean back into a nonexistent seat and put his feet up, to maybe take a nap.

It's not so bad to be floating half out of his head like this. Means the pain when they climb stairs is farther away.

"Detective," Kankri says -- repeats, even. Oh right, that's him. "Would you please remind Latula that, while I'm sure she must be very busy, she has a job to do?"

Huh. He pokes vaguely at the back of his mind, but there's no reaction, just an odd, distracted quiet. Damara is sulking in another corner -- Slick is an unknown element, Dave might even possibly survive this! She's not enjoying it. "Haven't seen her since we got here. ... Heard her. Thing."

"Well," Kankri says, "fuck. Never mind, Detective -- Jack, where are we going? I'm _positive_ we have seen this painting before, do you have any actual idea where we're going?"

"I fucking did, and then you started yapping," Slick grumbles back. "So, just like old times."

"Oh, my _apologies_ \--"

"You're excused. Now, you see anything that reminds you of... anything?"

"No, actually, I do _not_ , because if you'll remember, the last time I was _taller_."

Uh. What? This is something Dave feels like he should get, but he... doesn't.

"And I'm pretty sure we were coming from the opposite direction, so what are you doing--"

"We were fucking _not_ , we were on the second level and this is the _fourth_ , shit-for-eyes--"

They both fall brusquely silent. Dave frowns, squints.

It's a corridor without any window onto any courtyard. The carpet isn't bright green around here, but red; there's little ... are those sigils threaded in as motifs? Huh, expensive...

The elevator is marked "Level Two" above the button. It's also blinking ominously.

"God, I hate her so fucking much," Slick growls under his breath as he heaves Dave higher up against his side and takes off trotting for the heavy wooden door at the end of the corridor. Dave tries to help but his toes barely touch the ground.

"I'm not going back in there!" Kankri hisses, but he glances back at the elevator door, which is rumbling, and skitters after them. His back blades are bristled all the way up and so are the quills in his hair, making the ordinarily smooth hairdo poof up. It's mildly hilarious.

"Yeah, neither am I," Slick shoots back, a hand shaking the doorknob, "because it's _fucking locked_. Surprise! Shit."

Dave snorts, can't help it. Slick and Kankri glare in tandem at him. He lifts a hand palm out in surrender. (Tries to. He's still holding his metal bar.) "... Closet over there?"

They'll be so lucky if Kankri alone fits, never mind all three of them, lovingly cuddling up to his pointy bits, but like. What else? The elevator is slowing down and he--

"Everybody close your eyes," Slick says grimly as he opens the closet door. "Looks like we're going back after all."

Dave stares at the cleaning stuff taking up all the space in there, and closes his eyes.

He's pretty sure he hears and feels Slick closing the closet door again before opening it and stepping through.

They don't run into any brooms.

"... Can I open my eyes now?"

"Oh, of course!" a lady’s voice says. Dave's eyes fly open.

It's very much not a closet. Looks like... maybe an office, or actually more of a _parlor_. All the windows are barred and hidden with heavy drapes, but the ceiling lights are on. All the better to see the truly spectacular amount of seals across every single flat surface. Safety, concealment. Consulting. Incarnating. Containment.

A lot of containment.

Snowman is standing by one of the windows, arms crossed elegantly, and for a second she smiles so sweetly at Dave that he can't help but wonder who the fuck she even is.

Then her eyes land on Slick, and narrow into watchful little scalpel-eyes.

"Spades."

"Snowman."

... Okay, they know each other -- no shit -- and really don't like each other -- and are working together anyway. That is very interesting. Dave is very interested.

Slick shrugs off his arm and Dave stumbles briefly, leans back into the heavy, ornamented wooden door they did/didn't come out of. Kankri huddles against Dave's thigh; Slick keeps ambling toward the woman, a hand in his pocket like he's fingering another knife. "I really goddamn hate it when you pull that trick door shit."

Snowman doesn't even bother uncrossing her arms, never mind moving. "You mean when I put you back on the right path when you get lost? I don't think you have any idea how many times you almost opened a door into a lounge full of people."

"Maybe it'd have been shorter if I could just stab my way through!"

There's a beat of silence. "... No. No, Slick, it wouldn't have been."

Yeah, Slick is a bicker slut, okay, Dave gets the picture; he'll bitch at Kankri, at Snowman, what a flirt, whatever. There's something to this room...

Something in this room.

He feels along the wall for the light switches, clicks one of the two off, and in the sudden dim he sees it -- something like a heat shimmer in the air and yet not, something he needs to _destroy/ **destroy** /get away from/I hate it/ **run**!_

The bar falls, dull thud on thick carpet. Kankri's hand closes on his wrist, halts him before he pitches to the side and falls. Dave closes his eyes. He can feel his pulse in his temples, too fast and dizzying. He -- wants what's in that circle, and _fears_ it, and would burn down the _world_ to destroy it -- to have it back, **devour** it back, but _there's **no** having it back_ \--

He swallows. _Damara?_

 _Fuck off!_ she snarls back, huddled at the back of his brain. He knows it's all metaphorical and yet he could swear he feels her weight, coiled heavy and tight against his skull, trying to pull it back.

The door is behind him. There is _no_ farther back.

_... Are you okay?_

The hissing, poisonous offense that bubbles up at him almost physically stings. _Don't ask me! Don't -- don't **like** me!_

Oh god, he could see himself finding some pity for her, right now. Welp. "What _is_ it?" He frowns at the patterns, trying to make sense of them. There are three containment seals in the room but only one of them gives him/her the shudders. Layer upon layer, complex, studded with symbols from at least three languages -- is that a hieroglyph? And here's another one. That funny eye with the makeup squiggles underneath.

There are folded-in corners, just like Dirk has on Kurloz's containment seal.

He doesn't remember why, he had the impression that Dirk had come up with it, but parts of this pattern look -- feel -- older.

Years older. What the fuck.

"So who's in there?" Dave asks, forcing his voice out to interrupt the bickering and managing a mellow conversational tone at the very best. Snowman still pauses to look at him, though.

"What can you feel?"

"I can feel Damara freaking the fuck out about it." He blinks, frowns some more at the circle. "... Time?"

"Mmh."

"Sweet," Dave says without thought, "I could just walk up and summon."

Kankri's hand closes like a manacle on his arm and gives a punishing yank. " _No!_ I just -- no. Detective, I entreat you to _read my lips_ , and understand -- no. You have _not_ studied this demon to know what they might demand of you, you have no idea what state of mind they're in right now -- if they're locked in here and unable to rejoin the ether they must be considered intractable for some reason, and you are, might I add, exhausted and injured and bleeding out! No. It is too much of a risk and you are _not_ taking it _for a lark_."

"Um," Dave says, blinking through the pain.

"I'm pretty sure he was joking," Snowman says dryly. She's not smiling at all but Dave is mildly sure she's laughing at them.

"I'm pretty sure he was, too, and yet somehow it might well happen anyway, considering the hair-raising tales Karkat shares!" Kankri harrumphs, then sits on his curled tail, crosses his arms fussily. "Never mind that walking up to a random circle and making a contract blind with an imprisoned and therefore _furious_ demon is the most suicidal, stupid thing--"

"Seems to have worked out for Spades," Snowman says casually.

Oh. _Oh_!

Okay, Dave feels _really slow_. "Uh, when did--"

Kankri is making the clamming-down-because-ow face. Dave's hand hovers, tempted to touch him, not knowing if Kankri wants it or if it'll make it worse.

"Consider the question unasked. Actually I could have figured it out eventually just from how Slick was talking about a time you were both here. I just... Fuck, I'm woozy."

He's woozy, his hands feel cold, and his heart is beating... kind of fast, but. Kind of shallow, too, if a heart can do that. Fluttery. This is probably not good.

"You do know that Mister Slick is a Knight of Blood?"

... Since when does she call him mister anything. "--Oh. Yeah?"

"And I understand you must be very tired after today's various ordeals, so I will be walking you through--"

"You a demon?" Dave asks.

The voice sounds identical to Snowman's, no funny twist or odd accent, but the stuff she says with it... Snowman's body blinks, nonplussed, and then gives him a charming, dimpling smile. "Yes, I--"

"They grabbed me to force that yappy asshole into one of these," Slick says, voice flat and annoyed, pointing at one of the circles with his thumb, "then they were planning to slit my neck to get the other kid too, so we got the fuck out."

"You're welcome," Snowman says dryly -- this time it's her again, Dave is pretty sure.

Kankri is making a little hissing noise under his breath, but it sounds more like annoyance than pain, so probably his contract doesn't cover other people being free with the information he's supposed to keep on lockdown under his nose.

Dave drops a hand on his head to pat along the quills (he accidentally gets the edge of a horn, a bit bigger than expected. His hands are so cold.) Then he takes a step toward the heat-shimmer circle.

Where Aradia is a wheel of seasons, standing poised at early spring with the whole year ready to unfurl, and Damara a blizzard and a waiting cliff, the demon imprisoned in this circle is the sterile, inert cold of space. There's something raging underneath at the unfairness of that enforced stillness -- all that space and nothing _moves_. It almost stills Dave's feet, feeling it.

 _Don't_ , Damara pleads-snarls. "Don't!" Kankri accidentally echoes. Dave blinks.

"Oh, I'm not making a contract, I just. If the Felt really wants this demon contained then I feel kinda honor-bound to fuck with them to the max."

 _Don't free her_ , Damara says, but less... hatefully.

_Why not?_

_... Because,_ she says, and nothing more. Dave sighs and takes another step forward.

He's not entirely sure where to splash any of his blood in a way that will be disruptive, but not result in a power rebound to his face. He feels that's kind of important. It's apparently a shitty way to die.

He also feels like if he tries to bend over he's never going to get back up. The room is slowly oscillating around him and he's pretty sure it's not Snowman's fault, or whatever Babe of Space she has sharing real brain estate.

"So. What's your Name?"

There's a brief moment of stillness, and then both Snowman and Slick laugh -- sharp, short, mocking barks -- and then glare at each other for laughing, and Kankri wails, " _Did everything I say go straight through your cranium and right back out?!_ "

Dave tries to flap his hand at him but it unbalances him a little, so he stops.

"I mean, you don't gotta, but it'd help. Help us help you fuck them up and jet? If that's even what you want, sorry, I don't wanna assume..."

God he feels like shit. And the circled-up demon isn't even reacting; he thinks he could tell if she was.

 _No_ , Damara whispers, but oddly reluctant. _Please don't. Dave._

"...Damara doesn't know if she wants you out or not. Mostly not, but. What's the story?"

Damara is bunched up small and quiet, furious and resigned, trapped by Dave and by her oaths, caught on the shards her own self makes. She wants -- something, and hates herself for wanting it. Dave is too tired to follow up on that.

"... Okay. You do you. We'll just..."

He turns to look at Slick and Snowman, just in time to see Snowman catch Slick by the tie and yank him in for a kiss. Huh. Slick goes flailing his hands like a dork, eye wide under his hat -- he's shorter than her, shit, that's cute.

Then she shoves him off and turns to look at Dave, who blinks back. Huh. Maybe he should have looked away--

Something explodes behind him. The room sways -- forward and then back, and his leg explodes into white-hot pain. 

Plush carpet under his cheek. Both hands locked white-knuckled on his thigh. He can't settle down and breathe, making little high-pitched noises with each gasp. When he blinks his eyes open everything looks too dark for a too-long moment. 

The line of a seal is an inch from his nose. Is he crossing it, he thinks to wonder. Huh. 

Oh, Karkat is standing over him, bristled like a war. Dave closes his eyes again. It hurts.

... No. Wait. That's Kankri. One hand clenched on Dave's elbow -- tingling fingers, gonna be a bone-deep bruise -- did he yank Dave back before he could faceplant in the circle?

Dave tries to breathe a little deeper. He should look at what's going on, figure out... but it hurts and. Just. No one's attacking him right this second. He doesn't want to move. 

It's not Karkat over him, ready to fight, to give him as much breathing space as he needs. It's Kankri, who needs protected. He makes himself crane his head.

New people. He sees mostly legs. White-clad slacks in the middle of a lot of darker, not-as-neatly-pressed pants.

(" _Permit me to offer you my condolences_.")

Lip curling up, Dave rolls from his side onto his front. (The room seems to keep rolling long after he's caught himself.)

There are voices. (There have been voices for a while.) Snowman and the douchebag in white --

"And naturally you only attracted them here to restrict their movements until we could reach you," the guy is saying, voice like he's speaking through a mouthful of cream, satisfied and tasting every word. 

"Naturally," Snowman says back, just as unctuous but a lot more sarcastic about it. "Though I did not expect you to take so long."

"Yes," Scratch replies pleasantly, "it seems we misplaced the room."

They stare at each other. Spades Slick has a knife in each hand and is sneering, though silent; Kankri is still puffed up, frozen.

Snowman's lips curve into the ghost of a smirk. "My mistake. I am, of course, your faithful servant."

Dave can't see their faces, everything is still that weird kind of dark you get after you press your hands on your eyeballs, but that silence -- it's _pointed_. Anyone with less class would be breaking out the ' _yeeeah right'_ s --

"Ah _ha!_ " Scratch exclaims, white-gloved fists on his hips, triumphant.

The world breaks.

The world breaks, or his head, or his -- he loses Damara, finds her again, finds her anew, loses himself. He's sixteen just walked out of class and terrified, he's six and where's Bro, he's --

Something is yanking on his body. Bright flash of pain, and then darkness comes up on its heels --

_**No** , firetruck, you pass out now, you **die**!_

... Why is it a bad idea again...

"...tula-- I can't --"

_It's good enough like this, Kankster. Dave? Dave Strider._

Dragon scales -- tarnishing under his eyes, chipped, torn out and there's raw meat and pain behind, sorry, girl, sorry.

_Shit. I ain't gonna -- Damara!_

There's talking in the back of his head, talking outside in the room too but it's not the same discussion and he gets lost in the middle. Muffled sounds, notions too fast to catch, to put into words. He wants to float away.

_Helping you -- I refuse._

_You're not helping save him, Damz, you're helping him suffer longer. Name your terms._

_... When he keel over. I get first bite._

_Granted._

Not a second of hesitation. He vaguely wonders what poor bastard they're haggling over.

 _Dave_ , Latula says. _Dave_ , Damara repeats. _Dave Lalonde Strider_ , Latula says, harder.

_Knight of Time. Wake up._

He opens his eyes and finds his nose pressed to the carpet, his neck craned uncomfortably. 

"M'awake," he mumbles. They can stop ringing him like a bell now. He's queasy and cold all over, pulse fluttering, shallow -- he's awake like you'd be after two sleepless nights and a coffee overdose, or on drugs, it doesn't feel right.

_\--Leg! Keep it inside!!_

... He's inside the mystery demon's circle. He folds his leg back in, slowly; frowning, baffled. This is... this is the summoner's spot, theoretically safe but one less layer of protection between him and the still unnamed black hole of a demon...

"I -- I truly feel t-that you shouldn't -- that --"

Oh hey Kankri isn't nearby anymore, he's... where?

"Get behind me," Slick says, laconic. Why is Kankri all the way over there now, hiding behind the guy--

Staring at Dave in mute horror.

Dave is pretty sure Kankri was the one who pushed Dave's body inside the pattern in the first place. He was the only one close enough, for one thing.

When Dave finishes pushing himself up and sits -- hands planted in squelching, wet carpet -- he ends up nose to nose with Scratch.

Not Scratch.

He's crouching on the balls of his feet and it fucks with his perfect dress pants, creases his shiny shoes -- not Scratch. He's grinning -- too many teeth -- eyes too wild, too bloodshot--

Blood trails over the man's stretched lips, his teeth, bars his chin. He makes no move to wipe it off.

"Such a tangled... _Fucking_ mess. You really are the _best_ human."

Dave stares. For three seconds. Maybe three hours. (In the back of his mind Damara is shivering in terrified ecstasy.) 

Time is wrong. Less wrong than it's been -- the summoning pattern blocks it some.

It should block everything. He still -- his mind keeps hiccuping, trying to run through thoughts he's already had -- all the hair of his body is up -- he's met this demon before. When Kurloz died and when Jane died and.

Before.

Years before.

 _God I'm so sorry_ , Latula says, very quietly, and her battered scales fall away, the protective, desperate curl of her body loosening all at once like a too-tight rope finally sawed through.

Rose, he thinks, stomach dropping with terror. Rose is safe. Rose was with him when --

Inverted herself, Mage of Void -- manipulating oblivion, everything she wasn't -- and Dave followed, and who was the demon she even wanted at that point, the demon trying to tear her out of Dave, that Mage of Void, ancient and cold like a hatchet falling down onto a neck, like a firing squad -- did it even matter? Because the second Dave added his blood and his mind to the battle-- 

( _Class Four, there's one of each combination of class and aspect per Gate and not more, or not for long. Class Five, there's two per Gate, tops._ ) ( _What about the local. The local what?_ ) ( _ **Dave doesn't get to know.**_ )

Oh. Right.

He is never going to know enough of this Name to compel for jack shit -- to control, influence, keep himself safe -- his mind is just not vast enough, but he already knows too much of it; every whisper is a flare, every passing thought a 'here I am, come and get me.'

Dave opens his mouth and wants to be flippant, no big, and his "Caliborn, hey," comes out a strangled, dizzy whisper.

Out of grabbing reach inside a protective circle or not, saying that Name out loud is the stupidest shit he's ever done. It feels like he got called, a pull so strong he sways; it hurts. Something hot and wet makes its way from his nose to his lips, both nostrils; the whole parlor looks black, lightless, and then green and bright, and then dark, shadowed red once again, like a kid pressing on his eyeballs to make pretty lights.

It's not pretty. He wants to puke.

He wishes they had never chased that Rose-hunting Mage of Void away for the Lord of the Gate to _notice_. He -- doesn't wish, he -- Rose would have _broken_ \--

He's going to break. Caliborn is going to break him.

Not before he breaks Scratch, from the blood welling up at the corners of the body's eyes.

"My Lord," Snowman says in her low, veiled voice. "Your vessel is at its limit."

The face twists in overblown annoyance. "Useless."

"I must respectfully disagree, there are still plenty of things you need this particular tool for," she gently reminds the Lord of the Gate. "As he would tell you himself if he could."

The face scowls harder. Dave shudders. He's cold all over, deep inside, he's cold and keeps having flashes of -- my body's too big, I was just in class, last I remember I wasn't hurt like this -- weird hiccups in time, in his perception of time, and he's just so. He can't think.

It's terrifying to think that he might be losing real-time, too. He's not sure if his absences are just flashes or... more. Summoning circles are set up for Class Fours and it's not -- if Caliborn really pushes. It's not gonna hold.

"Latula," he whispers, but there's no answer.

He's alone. He can't hear Damara or Aradia either. He's alone. 

He wants Karkat. His sister. His brothers. Kankri's here but Dave has to protect him, protect Spades Slick, they'll get killed --

\--Slick is a Knight of Blood. He'll get sacrificed so they can get to Karkat. What kind of human even has a Blood attribute.

"The only other Blood summoner we know of at present is the Dalai Lama," Scratch says, and it would be urbane if his voice didn't come out like he spent the last hour screaming it bloody. He pulls a handkerchief out of his chest pocket with a hand that shakes and wipes delicately at his face, doesn't try to stand up yet. Dave concentrates on his own breathing. Half of the brain-shaken dizziness is gone with Caliborn's retreat into the ether but Dave's body still won't follow.

"Huh, yeah," he mutters. "That's gonna be awkward. Borrowing that guy. I mean. Security? Warrior monks?"

"We're fairly sure there are more in the world, it's merely difficult to find them amidst all the people who never do get tested and those who have too little potential to be readable. Plus some of the... Peculiarities of the Aspect, that makes other demons reluctant to, ah, snitch on them."

"Mm. I see." He doesn't see jack shit. "Hey, why are you not torturing me and-or Slick to call Karkat here, again? I mean, there's no way it wouldn't light us up like a beacon."

 _What if reason is their brain meats too stupid for good idea and thank you much for it_ , Damara mutters to him, and Dave blinks. 

_Oh, shit._

_Nah, just fucking you._

_... I fucking love you too, you jerk._

When Scratch gives him that mild blink, a last bloody tear rolls out. He wipes it off before it can reach the bottom of his cheek.

"Well, because the Lord of Time wants to ride you, of course, which should be quite enough."

For a long moment Dave can't think a single thing, not even a joke.

"... I'll die."

Scratch smiles. "Yes, that's a given. My condolences. Don't worry, though, I'm sure he'll hold back until Karkat arrives."

Oh. Fuck. Oh no. No. Dave is strong as summoners go -- comes of being born around the time the Gate decided to start expanding in the slowest localized apocalypse ever -- but Scratch is as strong as he is, or maybe even stronger, and he's _healthy_ and _well-rested_ , and thirty seconds of possession hurt him this much --

Dave is going to split open like an overcooked sausage if Caliborn rides him, he is going to die, his guts exploded and his soul in crushed tatters, there is no timeline in which he survives this.

"Can I decline," he mumbles, but Scratch is already standing up and utterly ignoring him, one of his goons offering the man an arm for support. 

"Take Strider out of that," Scratch says to his minions without looking back. Dave's fingers spasm on the squelching carpet.

He watches two mountains walk up to the circle, and doesn't know if he should fight or not. He's going to bleed out if he does. (Caliborn will kill him if he doesn't.) He's going to die, Karkat and Kankri are going to die, Spades fucking Slick is going to die--

 _Lucky_ , Damara sighs, nestled at the bottom of the pulsing migraine blooming in his skull since the Class fucking Five said hi. _Ridden to death by Master of Time itself. You will feel **everything**. _

He trembles.

 _So lucky._ Dave's mouth sighs.

And then a flash of red in the back of the room, as Kankri's wings snap open, huge fingers hooked on air like claws. "Is it _really_ lucky, Damara," he says, and sounds oddly calm, oddly -- tight, intense. Shivery. The air tingles with her Name with every single word Kankri says, like they were one by one coded for her soul, _targeted_.

She flinches; Dave's lip curls to bare fangs he doesn't own, neck craned to glare. (The mountains pause, frowning.)

"Weren't you promised first bite," Kankri says. 

" _Shut up_. Is right of the Lord, takes prey from weaker--"

"You will never get it. He's going to take it from you. You're going to sit and watch as they take it from you. Just like last time."

"Shut your whore mouth up!" 

"And you'll like it. Just like last time. You will squirm and smile and be happy to be stolen from once again, pathetically _grateful_ \--"

Dave isn't sure what happens. A guard steps closer? Slick -- throws something. A yelp. Dave's hand is up, aimed at Kankri and he burns with the need to rot that disdainful upturned nose, to dry all those eyes, draw great rents through that ridiculous amount of fragile, veiny flight membranes--

He makes himself close his fist, but he can't put it back down, Damara's fury beating at his body from the inside like she's trying to burst out through his skin. His head hurts so bad with Damara's push of magic that the lights seem to pulse.

"What -- get Strider _now!_ " Scratch snaps from the door. The mountains -- one holding his bleeding shoulder, one reaching for Dave/Damara with his big hand through the outer edge of the circle and how _dare_ he interrupt now?! --

They kill him, crushing the skeleton inside him to yellowed splinters and powder, they kill him and _feed._

A third man rushes them. Heart thumping with the power surge, they grin until their cheeks hurt.

The sudden absence of the man and the corpse barely registers; from one moment to the next Caliborn's hanging miasma of a presence is just _gone_ and Dave sways, head too light with lack of pain, with _quiet_. Damara stiffens in shock, and then Dave is holding up his arms alone; he drops them, too heavy. God. What. Where's...?

Slick's clothes are splattered with blood. When did that happen? Kankri is sitting up on his hindquarters, staring at...

Snowman. Not Snowman. Her body is an absence, a void filled with stars; her hands are spread like an orchestra conductor; all the arrays on the floor and walls are flaring, sparking greenish-white.

"We're in the heart of Caliborn's territory," the demon says, strained but still trying to sound pleasant. "I can't hold this for very long, the ether here is all tangled up and cut off from the rest. No demon will leave if they're not inside a body in _some_ way. And no, Jack, I can't do this all the way out."

"Motherfuck," Slick growls, and jogs to Dave. "Stand up. What's the plan? Don't you tell me a broad like you doesn't have one."

"Well." Dave feels like he saw two faraway suns blink. "Frankly? All I know is that at the moment Doctor Scratch _cannot see_. Caliborn is a stupid berk and should have thought that there's no way for a human to use a passive ability after having hosted _him_. He's made of everything Seering _isn't_." A pause. "So. If he cannot see. Then it's... not a fixed point?"

Slick explodes into swearing. Dave closes his eyes, tries not to swoon with the sudden spike of utterly stupid hope. They're still stuck in here and he's still useless.

"What fucking kind of pointless plan is this?! The fuck does he need to seer up if there's nothing to _do?!_ Fuck, get me a gun, I'll shoot us a way out. Strider, _up_."

"Phone," Dave mumbles while making a token effort at shifting his weight. "Get a phone. Police. Hello." 

"Fine," Slick says, like he's rolling his eyes. "A gun _and_ a phone. Like they'll arrive anywhere near on time. C'mon, Snowman, chop chop."

"We've been layering concealing spells on this place for the last _year_ ," Snowman rasps after a heavy, annoyed pause. "It has no fixed physical address anymore. You want the cops to get to us how? None of their seers will see jack shit as long as the ether is so stirred up, even if I take down every other ward I've got up."

"... Make it... have an address again?"

"We'll show up in the same space as existing buildings," she replies dryly. "I'll let it go once everyone is damn well _out_."

"We can't go out if they're camping all around us!" Slick snarls, and reaches down with his hand extended toward Dave's arm, like he's tired of Dave taking ages to find a good way to put his weight on his hand to maybe flex a leg.

" _Don't_ ," Kankri snaps, and pads closer. 

"What? Long as I don't step in myself--"

"There's nowhere you can touch he's not bleeding, and they're all Time. Physical contact will bridge it. Don't."

Eyebrows up and mouth pursed like he wants to go 'well excuuuse me', Slick steps back; Kankri steps in. Stares at Dave.

Stares maybe deeper than Dave.

"Damara Megido," he says, shaping each syllable with delicate distaste, and she hisses with Dave's mouth. "Damara the cowed," (A cliff ahead and no way to stop,) "Damara who was twisted for other ends than her own," (A blizzard of hate and ice, shredding everything in its wake,) "Damara who was _fucked over_." 

(Twisted pleasure and debasement and hate, self-hate, the shaking, slavish smile at the hand raised to strike it, the devastating adoration of someone toward their abuser.)

"Damara the useless."

" _Shut up_."

Kankri considers them, his four eyes heavy-lidded with disdain, and then continues. Dave has no idea where the fuck he's going with that bout of psychological warfare. He's trying not to hope that there's someone here who has the start of a plan...

"Askani Megido."

... What?

Time brought to a standstill, the very edge of the universe, the sterile stillness outside Space, outside anything that matters. A forceful absence of Time. And something not even cold, that knows it should want. That wants mostly out of stubbornness and habit.

"Say it, Dave," Kankri tells him, voice gentling so that it sounds like... Like Karkat, when he put Dave to bed that time, when he. When Dave said his second _I love you_ and Karkat tucked him in and said, _I don't get it, but I know_. Dave's throat tightens with missing him.

"Askani," he repeats. "Askani Megido."

Damara sneers, weak and tired despite all the power of that death they just took, broken and so sharp-edged that every move, every exertion is torture -- delicious torture that means she is useful, worthy.

 _It's killing you_ , Dave thinks at her.

 _Who cares_ , she whispers back, laid too bare for Dave to stand to look.

The demon Askani is filling the summoning circle edge to edge like a dead, still, depthless pond, Dave and Damara trapped on their tiny summoner's spot island and no way to cross the two inches to the outside without drowning.

"The two of you know what I am," Kankri says, almost gentle -- wise teacher to lost pupils, eyes a little distant. (Dave isn't feeling his Name, but he still remembers that part of it is _an arid desert where nothing has ever lived_.) "The two of you know what I could do."

"No," Damara whispers with Dave's mouth. (Askani's presence barely ripples, and not in a way Dave can read.) "Be that again -- I can't."

Kankri sits on his haunches, hands curled together on his knees, like they have all the time in the world. "Not alone, no. But don't you want it?"

She hisses quietly. Dave clenches a hand on his knee, and then pats it in some awkward attempt to comfort her. He doesn't even know how much of his body she has seeped into.

"No," she whispers. 

Kankri tilts his head. A lock of black hair slides across the bridge of his nose, between his upper eyes; he waits.

Dave's body breathes out in a long, fearfully quiet shudder. "...Yes."

Kankri nods, and reaches out with both hands for Dave's face, cups it. 

"Repeat after me, Detective. This is a contract with Askani Megido, Witch of Time, and Damara Megido, Witch of Time, on behalf of the one who will come after..."

Dave mumbles, eyes closed. 

Two Witches of Time. Huh. Strange one of them hasn't eaten the other one already. Class Fours are territorial.

Probably because Askani was locked up in here, where the ether doesn't touch the outside and no demon can escape who isn't wearing flesh. 

He thinks about Kankri in another of those circles, about Slick who never summons and still took him inside his own body. About how they would never have escaped this place if Snowman hadn't let them out, he's sure, and he still doesn't know why she's doing it, her and that star-filled demon with the gentle voice. It can't be because she loves Slick. Can't only be that. It's too big a risk, and. 

He doesn't know her. Maybe there's something else. Maybe she doesn't think it is too big.

It's a standard one-off contract Kankri is walking him through -- mutual assistance, mutually assured destruction. The more complex clauses fly far over his dazed head and he still parrots them back obediently, eyes closed, listening to that voice that still sounds like Karkat, that he trusts without a second thought.

He kind of wants Latula to tell him if he should. But that flicker of thought only returns an equally flickering echo -- a dragon sprawled in a loose curl in her deepest cave, raw wounds slowly bleeding out.

"... If the two of you are ready," Kankri says, low and not smug for once, more like -- tired. Sad.

Dave blinks his eyes open, looks at him, but his face is unreadable, a quiet sort of exhaustion that Dave has never seen on Karkat. "You okay?" he asks, and Kankri gives him a mild, lying blink.

"Fine. Damara?"

( _The inexorable, inescapable end of things_.)

"Fine also," she says, and laughs like for the last thirty years she has been smoking tobacco filled with broken glass; it scratches Dave's throat on the way out. "Go on. Do it."

Kankri does it.

Dave sways when Damara seeps out -- like she's gliding, dripping down his spine, settling in the cradle of his hips for a brief moment and then... then he loses his balance and his hand lands palm down on the line of the protection circle he's sitting in. He blinks, flinches, tries to take his weight off it to take it back -- there's blood on it, blood and skin and life and. Probably bad? 

He can feel the other demon too. The other Megido. She doesn't pounce.

Kankri's hand is on his hand, keeping it pinned. 

He feels them, blizzard and waiting cliff, the sterile stillness at the edge of space, separate, and then he just knows the cold. His hands and feet are cold from blood loss; he doesn't know what's real and what's their Names. He shivers.

He feels them -- Damara more, Askani just barely at the edges -- up until he doesn't. The sudden absence of Time-echo makes him feel like his head is ringing, cavernous like an empty church. He forces open his eyes.

Kankri's eyes are glowing right through his closed eyelids, four thin slices of blood-light along long eyelashes; a web of hair-fine veins visible through the glow. Dave watches his odd, chiselled face, the inhuman distance in it, and just. Waits.

It occurs to him that he's not too sure what he's waiting for. 

It wasn't a temporary contract for _Askani_ he signed, was it. ( _On behalf of the one who will come after_...)

All the circles flare red again; the whole room pulses with _Time_ and with power, like he's being squeezed from every side at once with too much air for the size of the room -- and then retracts so fast he feels unbalanced. Dave flinches, squints. 

Another presence rises up. Where Damara was the second before going over the edge of that cliff, this demon is what happens afterwards -- crumpled in snow, on ice, after the fall, body failing slowly, tic-toc, tic-toc, only another few breaths left before the stillness of your end will swallow you...

... And underneath the ice there's -- something, he thinks -- something like an orca or a sea serpent or maybe a goddamn _kraken_ just about to chomp you in two. Heh. Wow. Thought the fall would kill you, or the snow, but nope, here it is to rob you of the last few seconds you thought you'd still get. Dave giggles, struck with the irony of it. "Oh my god, girl. Are you...?"

He pauses briefly to contemplate the Name again, and then pushes it out through his mouth.

"Damani. Huh. You a Megido too? What's your. Heh. Hey babe. What's your sign."

Kankri is looking at him with his brow furrowed and Dave doesn't even care, just snickers again.

 _Witch of Time, this unworthy one is._ A pause. _Hello._

"'Nother witch? Man, how come Damara isn't hissing up a storm..."

Stillness, inside and out, a feeling like a head cocked.

_She is not anymore._

Dave opens his eyes, gazes at the floor, the smeared handprint across the circle, Kankri's knees.

_Not hissing anymore?_

_Not being anymore. This unworthy one is well-fed._

"... What?"

He forces his heavy head up to stare at Kankri, who squints like he wants to flinch away, and doesn't. "Askani was bound by the circle, and Damara was bound by her contracts and by her very _self_. It's not..." A pause; Kankri shakes his head. "Damani is not. Bound. By any of that. Now if you could enquire what she can actually _do_...?"

... Damara's dead? _Eaten?_

Eaten by a demon who only just came into being. Whose spoken name is... 

Eri-sol. Cal-loz. (Oh. That son of a bitch. Worse, that son of _Caliborn_.) 

Dam-ani.

_Is she your food or your parent?_

_This unworthy one knows no difference._

What? What. This makes no sense. Damara didn't want to die. Damara enjoyed her fucked-up life, messing with people, laughing at their pain. Damara loved him, or hated him, in that creepy obsessive way -- she'd just _told_ him, she wanted to see him dead -- Latula promised her the first bite of Dave's soul, she can't suddenly be fine just. Dying? Becoming fuel. She can't do that.

"She can't do that," Dave informs the room.

Snowman -- or the demon inside Snowman -- says, almost delicately, "The two Witches were born from a demon fractured in two by Scratch and... _him_. See it as her two torn, suffering halves being reunited...?"

Dave stares in disbelief. " _Is_ she that first demon who was torn? Damani."

 _No. This unworthy one is echoes and fragments. The closest they could get to being that again, many thanks to the Blood one, but still not that. Now if this unworthy one may dare to presume upon you,_ she adds with a touch of impatience, and then Dave's hands blur and shift like -- oh, clock gears. Metal skin. Brass and copper, nothing like Damara's dents and rust under flaking white paint -- bare and brilliant like they've only just been polished. Still blurry, though, maybe because she's so new.

No, wait, he's just crying. Okay, carry on.

_This unworthy one needs you to **fucking stand your meat costume up already**._

Slowly, legs shaking with strain, his elbows caught in a mobster's hands, Dave stands up. He swoons right into Slick's chest (sorry, handsomely tailored vest) and stays there, nose mashed to a cigarette-stinking torso, dizzy and blind with blurriness and a red glow in the semi-dark. The man eventually sighs in annoyance and wrestles him to the side, pulls Dave's arm across his own shoulders.

His leg is tacky-wet and cold from hip to ankle. He would throw up if he had anything to bring up. He wants to go home, but it feels like home is a word that has lost its meaning and he can't feel what it would even be like.

Karkat would be there. And Rose, and John, and Jade. His brothers. Roxy. Jake.

Not Jane, though.

Not Damara. At this rate maybe not Latula either.

Damani's soul wraps around him like a comforter, packs the echoing absence in his skull with snowflakes that seem like they would be furry and soft to the touch, that almost don't feel cold. He could borderline forget the predator watching him think he's going to die painless just to tear into him, just because it's fucking hilarious.

She's strong, and eager -- so powerful it tingles on his skin like his flesh is not insulating enough to entirely prevent her from seeping out into the material world. 

If they had a contest of wills, in the material world, inside his own body, corralled by his own contract, he would lose.

"Dunno what she'll do," he thinks to say. "So you guys should probably... hold on. If you're coming with."

Kankri's shelled hand closes around his hanging wrist; he crowds against Dave and Slick's legs. Slick is still holding him, flank to flank.

Snowman watches them with a little floating smile and makes no move to get closer.

"... Snowman? You could... probably escape before I get you into custody. Aren't you--"

"Ask your new girl if she can take me."

_This unworthy one would die, and get nowhere still._

"It's fine. I've got my own way out. And Slick..."

"What," he barks, but his dark eyes are drilling holes into her face with a terrible intensity.

"Fuck right off," she says in her low, cultured voice, and she laughs. "And don't come here again. There will be no third rescue."

"... 'Tch. If I need you again, just let me fuckin' die. Get moving, copper."

... Wow, wait, why does Dave think this spell is going to take them somewhere again. Maybe it'll just crumble the house under them. Maybe--

(He thinks through the whole of Latula's Name that he knows, makes sure he has her gathered whole and entire in his skull, limp and quiet.)

_Where are we going?_

_Nowhere_ , Damani says. _Nowhen._

Then she takes them into oblivion. 

It's... here and gone, like blinking, and then he's standing with the two of his hangers-on in the exact same place, only it's a blink where he ceased to exist in the moment his eyes were closed.

All the circles are unlit, burned out of the walls; there's soot all over red velvet, a crushed desk -- blood splatters. More blood splatters than Dave knows he's responsible for. It feels -- in this room, it feels. Like.

 _Not-time. Not-us._ Damani sounds satisfied.

Like Space; like the no-man's-land. Like the Felt's odd cordoned-off area was erased entirely, and the ether rushed back in.

The double doors to the room are blown off their hinges. Everything is still behind, not a noise, and Dave's ears buzz with the odd, total silence of lifelessness.

"What...?"

Slick drags him through the broken doors; the carpet squelches under their feet. Dave tries to move his feet along to help, and then forgets. Snowman is stretched out on her back at the next corner, a smile still floating on her painted lips, eyes staring blankly at the lack of ceiling.

She said she had her own way out, Dave thinks dumbly. He's not sure it was that one.

"... Jack," Kankri whispers, but Slick only pauses for a few seconds of silent staring before he ruthlessly drags them past her stiletto heels.

The corridor beyond is gutted, the courtyard a pile of bricks -- some that match the mansion, some that don't, and instead of the pretentious marble fountain there's another house standing teetering in the middle that he knows wasn't there before. 

"The protection wards," Kankri says, still in that hushed, tired voice. "She took them down. Or they came down with her. That's..."

He pads cautiously to the edge of the corridor, peers around the yard; Slick keeps Dave moving, looking for a staircase not filled with rubble. Dave tries to turn his head to keep track of Kankri and his head swims.

Slick is entirely, ominously silent.

Also Dave thought it looked like sunset, but. It's not. He can... he can feel it's not.

 _How long_ is a breath of thought, just a habit.

God, it's six AM. Where did the interval go. ... How did Damani _do_ this. Absence of Time. Stepping _out_ of Time? So weird. So...

Huh, staircase. His eyes are closed. He cracks an eye open but Slick doesn't seem to really need him to keep them moving, so.

They climb up things. Off things. Stairs and rubble and things that give a little in a way he doesn't want to think about. Things he doesn't...

 _Latula, honey_ , he thinks-feels, imagining himself burrowing against her shuddering flank. She'd be fuzzy, he thinks. Not cold. Not scaly-hard. Not her underbelly, at least, where he's... yeah, come on, girl, curl around me. Let's just... nap for a bit.

\--

When he wakes up she's gone and Damani is gone and his skull feels too big, echoing with useless space. Damara is gone forever and Aradia -- he doesn't want to call Aradia. She wasn't here when he wanted her to be and now he doesn't know what would be worse -- if she comes to him and reminds him of being deserted in his hour of need, or doesn't come and just. Makes him more alone. As long as he doesn't call there's a chance she would come if he did ask. There's a chance. Where's Latula.

Where's _Kankri_. Fuck. Rose -- he needs to take care of Kankri for Rose, and for Karkat, and he doesn't know where Kankri is, and he... 

Oh. Right. Eyes open; he heard that helps.

Takes him a minute or three (two minutes five seconds seven tenths of a second) to figure out he's on his back in the passenger's seat of a car, reclined down, his legs propped up on the dashboard. Slick is at the wheel, chewing on ... something. A stick. A pen maybe. Kankri...

"...Kankri?"

His head is too heavy to turn. There's got to be a backseat but he can't...

"Here, Dave." 

God, he sounds so tired.

"... Where...?"

"Where we goin'? No idea. He's drivin' me." Slick points his thumb back over his shoulder. 

"Oh." Dave frowns at the car ceiling. "... No precinct?"

"Har har. Good luck with that one."

"... Hosp'tal...?" He doesn't want to think too hard about why he would want a hospital. The mental fog feels blanketing and nice, he doesn't want to lose it.

"Not yet," Kankri says, absently, and Dave's seat shifts a little from his weight; when Dave rolls his eyes up he can meet Kankri's, looking down at him. His hair is such a mess and there's soot and blood streaked on his face and he looks _exactly_ like Karkat. Maybe older. A couple years.

Dave wonders if Damara incarnate would have looked exactly like Askani.

"Did you make her want that," he asks, raspy and slow, forcing himself to articulate. 

Because Damara didn't want it before. Dave knows she didn't. 

Kankri doesn't pretend not to know exactly what he means. "I didn't have to," he says, but toneless, tired. "When you've _been_ one being, it's... tempting, to go back to that. There is an echo -- a resonance. No matter how much you don't want that pull, how strongly you want to keep being you, it still exists. It won't ever," he adds, rough like a whisper, red eyes dim, "stop existing."

Dave thinks about how much Kankri and Karkat look alike. How _wary_ Karkat was of touching him, when Kankri incarnated. How they say they haven't spent any time together, but still _know_ things about each other. Like brothers. Like...

"Yes," Kankri says, very quietly.

"Oh." He digests that as the car rocks them over a pothole. They're so different now. They're even different classes. Damara and Askani weren't even that far apart.

"We were birthed with more care."

It's always weird talking with a Seer, when they start answering questions you didn't even ask yet, but it's convenient right now with Dave's mouth full of molasses and cement. Sort of convenient. 

He makes himself say it out loud anyway. "What was he like, the one before you? Your dad."

Kankri doesn't even correct him on terminology, like it's... good enough. Right enough.

"... Laughing. Hopeful." He snorts. "I don't know where those went. Wordy. Principled. Civil and poised, like me." A pause. "Altruistic. Like him."

"Sayin' you're not that."

"Enlightened self-interest is often a close enough substitute to an outside eye, but it is, indeed, not that."

Dave vaguely wants to pat him, but his hand weighs three tons, and his shoulder doesn't bend that far back to start with.

"It is not something I consider a personal failing," Kankri says with faint surprise, and actually does pat Dave on the shoulder, gingerly, clawed fingers curled back from the palm. "Merely odd to remember. How it was, being someone else. I have a lot of memories of his life -- almost everything Karkat didn't keep, I have -- the foundations of my very soul are built on them -- but he is still... not me. Not even half of me."

Dave blinks slowly at the car ceiling. "Huh." 

"Mm."

"Love of sundering," Dave mumbles, trying to gather the echoes of the word Karkat had used ( _live, live, **live**_ ) and. Oh. That's... Parental love? I'mma cut myself in two 'cause I love what y'all will become so much I'm fine dying for it? Jesus. "Think I'd have liked to meet him," he adds, baffled, "just to figure him the fuck out."

"Arguably, you did meet him -- once removed."

Dave frowns a little. (His face hurts. What the heck even happened to his face. He doesn't remember any specific incident.) "What, because he's arguably you once removed?"

"... That too," Kankri says with a small, subdued voice, with eyes dim to the point that they look dark, and Dave finally notices that. That this... talking about his dad is -- maybe not doing great things for his state of mind. He's not sure why, but better change the topic.

"So. I get why I get to know about. Like. Where baby demons come from. Being kinda ground zero for one, uh. Happening. The conjugal bed? Um."

(He kind of wishes Damani was around to laugh at him, or just say something about how she sees it, but their contract was a one-off, not even a retainer; she's gone. He may find her again later, but she could also just never talk to him ever again.)

Kankri pinches his lips at him. "A birthing stool, more like."

"--But anyway -- hey, fuck you -- anyway I dunno why Slick gets to know?"

Slick and Kankri snort together; Kankri sneaks him a look. Dave is glad to see that Slick's eyes stay on the road.

"Haven't even been listening," he says, which is probably a lie considering how close everyone is and that there's no music or anything.

"Well, we did find out an unfortunately large amount about each other the last time we were, ah, sharing the same bout of real estate, so we still have a nondisclosure agreement set up. Which I am not set to fret about overly much, as he cares so little about everything related to demonkind he'll have aggressively forgotten it all by the time we part ways," Kankri says with a shrug. 

"Damn fuckin' skippy." Slick snorts. "Ok, so, not that all that talk about families isn't _quaint_ and all, but now what are we doing to fuck up the Felt's endgame? Apart from not letting 'em sacrifice our asses."

"You could skip town," Kankri suggests. "The Lord of the Gate can hardly follow you _away_ from the gate. Granted you're not indispensable to his plans the way Karkat and I are, and if we try it he _will_ send people after us, but as you _are_ rather necessary--"

"I would rather french a clock," Slick snaps. Dave blinks up at him, tries to crane his neck. (Ow.) "... A _glock_. Is what I meant. Shut up." Mobster Supreme clears his throat. It's hard to say from this nostril-heavy angle but Dave thinks he looks kind of embarrassed. "It's my fucking town, like hell I'm letting them fuck it up worse."

Kankri snorts, nose in the air. "Oh, there's the Knightly suicidal stupidity. I was starting to wonder if I had miscast you somewhat."

(Dave pouts a bit, because fuck if he didn't have the same 'no, can't leave' reaction.)

"Anyway, I would rather avoid the mess that would come when we talk about the plans a dozen times with a dozen different people and everyone understands differently, and--"

"So basically you don't have a plan."

"I'm a Seer of _Blood_ , Jack, not Time or Light or -- argh. Give me your phone number if you won't come up with us, but why you expect me to have a full, workable plan already I have not the _faintest fucking notion_. I'm hardly the only one involved in planning--"

They're still bickering when the car turns left and comes to a stop. Dave groans. He was just getting comfortable, the cold in his limbs less distracting, and if... if it's just a low-class demon in the road they can manage it themselves, he just wants to _sleep_.

Doors opening, closing -- a waft of cold air on his cheek. 

"Up and at 'em, copper."

Ugh. 

When he opens his eyes he's already being sat up. His head swims; he closes them straight away. Kankri is down on the concrete ground, peering at him past Slick's legs.

"So you aren't coming up, then?"

"Nah, I'll pass. My idiots are gonna start getting reckless. I'll just pop him in the elevator..."

... Not the hospital after all then. God. Dave is cold. Slick's hands feel burning-hot on his shoulders. He's too tired to shiver.

"Alright then, let me just... Dave? Dave Lalonde Strider, your permission?"

Dave groans, throat tight around his nausea. The meat of his forearm stings a little. 

He cracks an eye open to see Kankri sitting on his haunches, grimacing, his belly beading red around a single, already-stained claw-tip. Did he... bleed Dave and then himself. Why.

Kankri lifts his hand, waves it in the air, and -- clanging noise, Slick snorting like he's amused, even as he pulls Dave's arm across his shoulders to lift.

Dave's head rolls back on his shoulders; his eyes crack open. Karkat is rushing down the fire escape of Dirk's building like a boulder rushing down an Indiana Jones temple corridor. Hitting each landing so hard the whole thing rattles, throwing himself around tight turns so fast his legs swing over open air, holding on with a single hand -- oh. 

Still almost two floors over the ground and he throws himself off of the stairs, all his claws punching through the brick of the wall; he skids-claws his lizardly way ahead and down until his handholds break and then he just jumps to the ground, tiny wings wide open. 

Slick pulls Dave up onto his feet and the little blood he has left in his veins migrates straight down with gravity.

Hands on him -- clawed and not -- frantic patting, snarling -- heh. Safe. 

He's so cold. It hurts being gathered in a ball -- bruises and wounds, his _thigh_ \-- but Karkat's body is furnace-hot and his arms solid, his wings...

"... fucking go _get Jane!_ " Karkat is snarling over his head, chin pressing into a bruise on Dave's skull and holding onto him with every single limb he has that wraps far enough around, and it's over, it's okay. It's okay.

He tries to free an arm to pat Karkat's cheek but his arm weighs a ton and Karkat's hold is unyielding and it's so much effort, and...

"I'mma pass out now," he mumbles, and then does.

\--

 _And to this child of destruction, patience and foresight to guide others to build_. Karkat-or-Kankri's gauntlet claws are draped with strands of shimmering silk; unbraiding, plucking strands out to braid them in elsewhere, some other way. _And to this child of healing, the strength to shield from harm before harm should occur._

Unspooled together in his hands, Rose and Dave sleep.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Scourge Summoner](https://archiveofourown.org/works/770318) by [Asuka Kureru (Askerian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru)
  * [Daemon AU Meme - Midnight on the Demon Patrol](https://archiveofourown.org/works/913397) by [Asuka Kureru (Askerian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru)




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